Most people think of mathematicians as people who hole up in their office and only come out for more coffee. They don’t realize it, but most mathematicians spend quite a bit of time traveling to visit collaborators and to go to conferences. If you want to be up-to-date on the latest research, the best way is still to go and talk to the experts!
The big event of the year is the AMS/MAA Joint Mathematics Meetings (the JMM) in January. This year it was in New Orleans and over 5000 people were expected to attend! It is simultaneously a huge conference with talks by experts from around the world on every conceivable area of math, and a huge social event. People go to hear math, but also to run into friends from undergrad and graduate school, from REUs they were a part of, and everybody else they might know who does math.
Of course, OU was well represented. There were OU faculty, grad students, and undergrads at the JMM.
First off, we should give a shout-out to Brian Archer, Andrew Holmes, and Patrick Orchard spoke about their undergrad research project with Dr. Kornelson:
“Orthogonal and Maximal Sets for Bernoulli Measures”
in the AMS Session on Dynamical Systems, and Topics in Analysis, II. It’s especially worth noting that this was a talk in a regular research session of the conference (they have undergrad only sessions, and it’s already impressive to be invited to one of those!)!
Second, if you’d like to read more about what the day to day conference is like, the OU grad students have a great series of blog posts on the MGSA blog talking about their experiences at the meeting. Check them out here.
Of course, some people seemed to go to the meeting just to have some tasty beignets 
.
Beignets at Cafe du Monde, New Orleans
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