All the Feels: Day 4 at Bridges

For my last blog post of the conference, I don't want to focus on individual moments I gleaned from speakers, or mathematical gems I acquired. Instead, I want to take the time to talk about something that infuses everything I do, and that is feeling.

Yesterday, I was speaking with one of the poets at the conference as we were getting ready to read our parts in a play together. I mentioned that sometimes the thing that seems to be missing from some of the mathematical art is feeling. I felt that there were a lot of explanations using equations and calculations, but I was missing the feeling behind it. I don't mean that I thought the people creating the work didn't feel anything. I think I was looking for something I could recognize as feeling.

The first speaker of the day was Matt Zucker, who talked about creating a squiggle sphere (Zucker, 2026). He said it was suggest that he should have called it a "squigglier sphere," and that led him to wonder what the squiggliest sphere could actually be. I loved that progression, playful and mathematical at once — one little thought leading to another question.

Matt talked about mathematical art being like a good riddle, where finding the underlying pieces is fun and figuring out how something is made is part of the experience. He described these things as invitations into conversations.

Looking back, I think that playfulness was its own kind of feeling, one I didn't recognize in the moment because I was listening for something else. I had been so focused on finding passion or awe that I missed the feeling of delight sitting right in front of me, dressed up as a riddle.

That made me think about something else that had been happening for me during the conference. There were times when I wasn't able to speak the language well enough to be part of the conversation. Sometimes I felt like I was standing just outside it, trying to work out how to join in. But perhaps that's okay. I don't need to know the language already. I can keep learning new things. I can stay curious. I can accept the invitation.

Another speaker, Amy Wendt, talked about her work with modular kirigami knitting (Wendt, 2026). She began by saying that she sometimes worries what she is doing isn't "pure math," but that it is mathematics with a purpose. That really made me think. Here was someone doing extraordinary mathematical work and still wondering if it counted the way it was supposed to count. It doesn't seem to matter who you are or how accomplished you are — there are still moments when we doubt ourselves.

It's funny how, watching someone else do something amazing, you can barely believe they could feel that way about themselves. Yet when it comes to ourselves, it's so easy to fall into that same imposter feeling.

The day ended with poetry, and it was there that everything from the day seemed to gather itself up. The poetry reading showcased work that was varied and absolutely beautiful. Then the poet I'd spoken with the day before stood up to read her own work. Before she began, she referenced our conversation, and spoke about how she feels about mathematics, about the particular area of mathematics she works in. I wish I had recorded exactly what she said, because at the time I thought I would remember it forever, and I don't. What I remember is the feeling of listening to her. She was so passionate about her mathematics, and there was such happiness in the way she talked about it. She was speaking to everyone in the room, but she was also, in a way, speaking back to me.

This made me think about how much perspective really is everything. I had been thinking about feeling as if there was one particular kind of feeling I should be able to see in mathematical art, when actually there are probably as many ways of feeling about mathematics as there are ways of doing mathematics. For her, it was passion and happiness. For someone else it might be awe, or curiosity, or frustration, or the satisfaction of finally seeing a pattern. When I think back to the first times I was trying to solve a mathematical puzzle and suddenly started to see patterns, I remember that feeling too. I didn't always know why things were working or what I was doing, but I knew I found it fascinating and beautiful. That was feeling. I think I lost sight of that at parts of this conference, and I'm so glad that somehow, through that conversation and then hearing her speak, that understanding was given back to me.

There was one other poet whose work made me unexpectedly emotional, and I found myself thinking again about how much feeling there really was in that room. It wasn't just that the poems were clever or mathematically interesting. They made me feel something.

But I don't want to limit this idea of feeling to poetry, because I don't think that's fair either. I would like to spend more time talking to mathematicians and mathematical artists about the feeling. What does it feel like when you discover something? What does it feel like when a pattern suddenly appears? What does it feel like when you finally understand something you've been working on? I'm wondering if we ask those questions enough, or if people who are deeply mathematical assume that everybody already knows what that feeling is, because they experience it themselves.

I thought about all of this again as I was waiting to be one of the last poets to read. I realized I didn't need to get up there and apologize for who I was. I didn't need to apologize for the length of my poems, or the content, or for being someone who had never written and shared a poem at a conference before. All I needed to do was get up there, share something from my heart, be vulnerable, and try something new.

And I have to say, it felt really good.

It was the first time I had ever written and shared a poem. I read it in front of poets who have published their work, in front of supportive classmates, and in front of a supportive teacher. I had been thinking all day about people wondering whether their work was "math enough," and here I was doing my own version of the same thing. Was my poem good enough? Did it belong here? Did I belong here?

Then I thought, maybe those weren't actually the questions I needed to answer. I had written something. I had something I wanted to share. So I got up and shared it.

Looking back over the conference, I think everyone in that room, and everyone at Bridges, has been a teacher. A teacher to each other. A teacher to me. A teacher about process, about making, about asking questions, about how to join and belong in a community. Teachers who reminded us to take risks, to try something new, and to step outside our comfort zones.

I take all of this forward with me as I continue in my career. I want to remember to take risks, to think outside the box, to share my knowledge with others, and to encourage a sense that not knowing is okay, in both my students and my colleagues. I want to remember that mathematics can be beautiful and surprising and frustrating and joyful. I want to remember that there isn't one way to experience mathematics, just as there isn't one way to do mathematics, or one way to belong.

I came to Bridges thinking I was coming to learn about mathematics and art. I am leaving with something much bigger — with questions, with new ways of seeing, with a renewed willingness to try things I haven't tried before, and with a reminder that feeling has been part of my mathematical story all along.

Perhaps I didn't need to find the feeling here. Perhaps I needed to remember that I had been carrying it with me all along.

References

Wendt, A. (2026). Modular kirigami knitting [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture, Galway, Ireland.

Zucker, M. (2026). Reaction-diffusion Truchet tiles [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture, Galway, Ireland.

Story, Mathematics, and Finding My Place: Day Three at Bridges

 I woke up enthusiastic today, maybe because I’d finally slept, maybe because I could feel how full the day was going to be before I’d even opened my eyes: two plenary talks, an interview with a sparkly gem of a person, lunch with my son, a run of short papers, a workshop where I got to read part of a play (Petsinis, 2026), and the fashion show waiting at the end of it all. It felt like a lot. Looking back now, it was wonderful, and it left me thinking about stories, questions, and how I might carry some of this back to my own classroom.

The first plenary was Amy Alznauer, and I’d been looking forward to her talk since I first read her bio and some of her books. She is, unmistakably, a storyteller, and her talk carried that same feeling and curiosity into the room. She built her talk around amateurs: her own father stumbling onto Ramanujan’s lost notebook, Sallie Wolf charting the moon with her own body as instrument, and Marjorie Rice discovering pentagonal tilings from her kitchen table (Alznauer, 2026). I kept scribbling down the same handful of words: questions, obsessions, amateurs, curiosity.

Why do we tell stories? That question sat underneath the whole talk. Turning it over for myself, I think it’s because stories are how we connect, how we hand a piece of shared human experience to someone else. Amy quoted Anne Carson: “A question can travel into an answer as water into thirst.” Maybe mathematics and stories aren’t as far apart as we like to think.

She also talked about children needing to see mathematics as something creative and adventurous rather than simply a place where you’re either right or wrong. I found myself thinking about how rarely my students get to be fascinated by a problem instead of just solving it, and how much of that comes down to knowing what already delights them.

That same thread, entry points into ideas, kept surfacing throughout the day. Clare Moriarty spoke about Oliver Byrne’s colourful version of Euclid, which uses diagrams to communicate geometric ideas (Moriarty, 2026). Gary Lester talked about the importance of approaching a topic like a novice rather than an expert (Lester, 2026). That one stuck with me because I’ve lived the version where a lesson flops because I assumed something was simple. My own expertise got in the way. I’d have taught it better if I’d remembered to imagine it as brand new.

Other speakers explored children’s books, LEGO, embroidery, and kolam as ways into mathematical ideas (Kopyt, 2026; Reimann, 2026; Ryan, 2026; Elangaivendan et al., 2026). Sometimes the art helps us see the mathematics differently. Sometimes the mathematics helps us enter the art. Either way, I keep coming back to the idea of a doorway: how do we build one that lets someone actually walk through?

And then I’m left wondering: What happens after the book is closed, the sculpture finished, the play read aloud? What conversations keep going? Which questions actually stay with a child once the lesson is over? How do I help that happen, rather than just hoping it does?

Today I listened to mathematicians, authors, artists, philosophers, and teachers talk about mathematics in all sorts of ways, and somewhere in the middle of it, I think I started to understand why this conference matters to me the way it does.

When I first arrived at Bridges, I felt like I owed the room an apology for who I was in relation to mathematics.

I’m not a mathematician. I’m a primary teacher. I love books, telling stories, and children who ask strange questions and land on unexpected connections. I’d been treating those things as if they pushed me to the edge of this community. But what if they don’t? What if being drawn to story is one of the ways I contribute here? What if noticing how children come into mathematics is its own kind of expertise? I don’t have to be the person who already knows the mathematics. Maybe I can be the person who notices the spark and helps someone want to know it. I’m ending the day feeling like maybe I belong here after all.

References

Alznauer, A. (2026). Lunar music, lost notebooks, pentagons, and paralysis: How the hidden stories of amateurs – of those who love – offer vital counsel to both mathematicians and artists [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture, Galway, Ireland. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-3.html

Elangaivendan, P., John, C., & Chandrasekharan, S. (2026). Making kolam accessible through representational restructuration. In Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture. Tessellations Publishing. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-545.html

Kopyt, M. (2026). Talking about mathematics through books. In Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture. Tessellations Publishing. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-537.html

Lester, G. (2026). Art as mathematical representation: A practice-based investigation of cognition and pedagogy. In Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture. Tessellations Publishing. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-553.html

Moriarty, C. (2026). Semiotics, ease, and elegance: Oliver Byrne's Elements of Euclid [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture, Galway, Ireland. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-1.html

Petsinis, T. (2026). Mathematics on show [Workshop]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture, Galway, Ireland. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-685.html

Reimann, D. (2026). Using LEGO® elements to communicate mathematical concepts. In Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture. Tessellations Publishing. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-549.html

Ryan, G. (2026). Threaded theorems: Hand embroidery as mathematics outreach. In Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture. Tessellations Publishing. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-541.html

Full of Beauty: Day Two at Bridges

Today was full of beauty. Before starting this master's degree, I would have laughed if someone told me math was beautiful. Now I see it everywhere here, not just in the finished art but in the ideas themselves, and in the people who play with them.

             Beautiful food was part of my day as well!

The openness with which people here share ideas is part of that beauty too. I learn almost as much from listening to conversations between sessions as I do from the talks themselves. There is something enchanting about watching people think together, building on one another's ideas with genuine curiosity.

Nick Sayers (2026) talked about using math-based art for social justice, which didn't surprise me the way it might have previously; I already knew his work a little, from a course earlier this year. What struck me instead was something I'm only just starting to put words to: I think what's sometimes missing for me in math art is the feeling part. Maybe that's just how I move through the world. I always seem to come back to the feeling behind things, even in mathematics, apparently. I find myself wanting to know not only how a piece works or why an artist chose a particular process, but what made them fall in love with the idea in the first place. There's so much careful reasoning behind why a piece gets made, but I want to hear the feeling behind it too, and that's what I appreciated about Sayers' talk: he brought that sense of meaning and feeling alongside the mathematics.

He also talked about a photograph limiting the world to one little rectangle, and how he'd started making work that tried to hold something more panoramic instead. That pulled me straight back to Meurig Beynon's (2026) construals from yesterday: a photograph freezes a single rectangle, but everything that made that rectangle matter is missing from it, what the person behind the camera was feeling right then, the climate, the time of day, the place, how familiar or foreign it felt to be standing there at all. None of that survives the frame.

Later that morning, I met another participant while walking to the conference. When he learned that I teach young children, he told me about his flatmate, who had created projects he thought would appeal to children, and introduced us. One involved a PVC cylinder wrapped in mirrored film beside a flat, pixelated drawing that looks like nothing until the reflection transforms it into a complete image. My first thought was about my students. Could something like this become an invitation to play?

That same sense of curiosity seemed to run through the whole day. What kept striking me wasn't just the mathematics but how alive everyone's wonder was. Every presenter seemed genuinely delighted by the process of exploring an idea, and the audience met them with the same spirit, asking "what if?" almost as often as "how?"

Dave Whyte's (2026) talk on his gif art, Bees & Bombs, seemed to embody the kind of play I noticed all day. He doesn't start with an image he wants to create. Instead, he plays with different parameters and ideas from his "bag of tricks" until something surprises him, and then he follows that thread wherever it leads. I saw that same playful spirit in Kerry Mitchell (2026), serious in front of the room and clearly, underneath that, having enormous fun filling space with curves. Helena Verrill (2026) opened her session with the perfect joke: "Here is a Hilbert curve," she said, holding up what looked like nothing more than a solid black square. After enough iterations, a Hilbert curve fills the entire square. I immediately started thinking about my own students and how I might invite them to discover this idea through play, experimenting with curves and watching a space slowly fill.

The most playful part of the day wasn't a talk at all. Three of us got properly lost trying to find the cafeteria where the rest of the group was waiting, wandering through a building none of us understood. We found everyone eventually, and somewhere along the way something shifted, from feeling awkward and late to simply laughing about it. Then we all sat down together to read Tom Petsinis's (2026) Euler's Vision aloud. I played i, the imaginary number. My first attempt at post-secondary school was theatre, long before any of this math, and it was strange and wonderful to feel that old love show up again, tangled into this new one.

I think that's the thing, actually. The wonder is the beautiful part. Whyte nudging his parameters around until something catches his eye, Mitchell and Verrill filling space with curves just to see what happens, the mirrored cylinder revealing something unexpected, the three of us laughing our way lost through a building we didn't understand before we'd even sat down to read, all of it is the same small spark of wonder, just given room to grow.

And belonging turned out to be tangled up in that too, though not in the way I expected coming in. It isn't about already knowing the math or always knowing the right questions to ask. I am still finding my way into these conversations, still learning the language, and still figuring out where my voice fits.

But I am beginning to wonder if my place here might come from noticing something that feels important to me: the feeling behind the mathematics. I am drawn not only to the ideas themselves, but to the stories, emotions, and human experiences that surround them. Perhaps that is the perspective I bring—not as an artist or mathematician, but as a teacher who is always wondering how people connect with ideas and how children might discover that same sense of wonder.

I came into today still carrying some of yesterday's worry about whether I belong in a room like this. Maybe I don't need to earn a place by knowing enough already. Maybe belonging is also about bringing the questions, perspectives, and ways of seeing that are uniquely yours. And perhaps, over time, I will find my voice in this community—not by becoming someone else, but by offering what I already notice.

References

Beynon, M. (2026). Building bridges: Making sense of mathematics and art. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, 21–28. URL

Mitchell, K. (2026). Creating art with space-filling curves. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland. URL

Petsinis, T. (2026). Euler’s vision. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026_Supplement_111.pdf

Sayers, N. (2026). Math-art with meaning: Explorations in artistic mathematics [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland. URL

Verrill, H. (2026). Colour pooling on Hilbert curves. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland. URL

Whyte, D. (2026). Bees & bombs: My gifs [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland. URL

What's Left? Day One at Bridges

I walked into the conference with a green sticker on my badge, marking me as a first-timer, and a small, familiar feeling of not quite belonging. Then George Hart said, right there in the room, that mathematics is fundamentally a human experience, and it sent me straight back to a book from an earlier course, Francis Su's Mathematics for Human Flourishing, which spends its pages making the case for all the ways doing and studying math can be virtuous, and how it makes us grow as humans. Something in me settled, just slightly, hearing Hart say it out loud in a room full of people who study and create math/art for a living.

His talk, Math/Art at the Dawn of AI, is where the day's real question first showed up, though I didn't recognize it as a thread that would weave my day together yet. Hart described asking AI to generate three-dimensional mathematical sculptures, and the results were a strange kind of impressive: the images looked fantastic, the accompanying explanations sounded fantastic, and none of it quite matched. The math understanding wasn't there. Not yet, anyway. He kept circling a bigger question underneath the technical one: is AI democratizing art, handing new tools to anyone who wants to make something? Or is it terrible, stealing from human creativity without ever really understanding it? He brought up the camera as a comparison, another technology that was supposed to end an art form and instead just forced painting to change. Someone in the room raised the question of credit, of whose work this actually is when a machine generates the object and a human generates the prompt. I don't think it was answered. I don't think it can be, yet.

I sat with that question longer than I expected to, mostly because of my brother Erik. He writes code for a living, and lately most of his work hours go into reviewing what an AI has already written rather than writing it himself. He used to think of his coding as its own kind of artistry. Now he tells me the part he loved is disappearing, replaced by checking someone else's, or something else's, work. I kept thinking about him through the rest of Hart's talk, and I'm still not sure what to do with that.

Then I sat down for Ayliean MacDonald's talk, titled, of all things, It's About Time. I'd already spent two full days writing about time on my own, unprompted, before I knew this talk existed, and hearing her open by saying she's always been someone fascinated by time felt like unexpected company. She talked about an old man in her neighbourhood, a friendship built on math, who measured his own life out in seconds, among other delights, and she showed us the paper he'd worked it out on. She described a project of 32-by-32 grids, all begun differently, made by hand, the making itself stretched out and time-lapsed or shot in stills, so that endurance became part of the material. At one point I found myself silently wondering which came first for her, the mathematical understanding or the art, whether one pulls the other along or if they arrive together. I never asked. The room moved on, and so did I, and now I'm left holding the question myself, the same way Hart's room was left holding the credit question. Maybe that's fine. Maybe conferences are supposed to send you home with a few of these still open.

The talk that followed, on construals, came from Meurig Beynon, who explicitly addressed some of his ideas as a response to Hart's talk that same morning, which I appreciated, since it meant I wasn't the only one still turning Hart's questions over. He introduced the idea of a construal as an artifact that captures a partial, personal understanding of something, never the whole of it. A map isn't the campus. It's one person's negotiated relationship with the campus at one moment. He said something that I wrote down word for word: teaching is communicating your construal to someone else. I'll admit the deeper mathematics of his talk mostly went over my head. But that one idea landed, and it's already changing how I think about my own classroom. If every student is building their own partial construal of a concept, and I'm building mine, then teaching isn't handing over a finished, correct thing. It's finding a way to let two partial understandings meet.

By the afternoon, Anton Bakker was talking about lattice sculptures and puzzles that took his team a literal decade to solve on an old TRS-80 computer, back before the program that eventually solved them in minutes existed. He said something that pulled the whole day together for me: the industrial revolution took our muscle, and now something is coming for the brain too, doing the calculating and answering the questions for us. What's left, he wondered, after both of those are gone? He thinks it's the questions themselves. The wondering. The choosing of what's worth asking in the first place.

I came into today with a green sticker and a flicker of insecurity about whether I belonged in this room of mathematicians and artists. I'm leaving it with an unasked question about art and understanding, an unresolved question about credit and authorship, and a genuine, thrilling sense that the not-knowing is mine to keep. Not-knowing has always felt like room. Room for growth, for openness, for wonder. If a machine can eventually calculate anything and generate any image, what does that leave the rest of us to do, and is it enough?

References

Bakker, A., & Verhoeff, T. (2026). From Koos puzzle to lattice sculptures: Navigating vast spaces of form, meaning, and wonder. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, 29–36. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-29.html

Beynon, M. (2026). Building bridges: Making sense of mathematics and art. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, 21–28. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-21.html

Hart, G. (2026). Vibe coding math/art projects [Conference presentation delivered as Math/Art at the Dawn of AI]. Proceedings of Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, 515–518. https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2026/bridges2026-515.html

MacDonald, A. (2026, August 5). It's about time [Conference presentation]. Bridges 2026: Mathematics and the Arts, Galway, Ireland.

Su, F., & Jackson, C. (2020). Mathematics for human flourishing. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt1sgss.8

Getting to Galway: A Prologue

This trip started with some uncertainty. I found myself wondering what the probability of us getting to Dublin on WestJet actually was, and whether the odds were in our favour. It seems fitting that this journey to the Bridges Conference began with a math problem of sorts. Watching the news, I saw that as a precautionary measure, many WestJet flights were being cancelled. Luckily, I'd originally booked through Delta using points, and they easily made the change for us. We left a day earlier, flew KLM to Amsterdam and Amsterdam to Dublin, and had a much better trip for it: fed, comfortable, no stress wondering if our flights would vanish out from under us. Sorry, Olly, that you had to weather that storm.

My son has been a great travel partner. Even-keeled, as long as I know when it's time for quiet. I've noticed he's often mathematising without realizing it: "Wow, that's expensive for dinner." "That's a lot for crisps." And I've caught myself doing the same, calculating the time difference between BC and Ireland, working out how long we have until our gate, dinner, hotel, bus stop. Even now, I'm thinking about how much downtime we need before our next outing. I'm thinking fish and chips. I'm thinking it's a little wild how often we want to eat, though I blame my 17-year-old, who managed two meals on the first flight and a sandwich on the hop to Dublin and then told me he "hadn't really eaten anything in a long time." Hence our real meal: a very good alfredo at the Clayton Hotel. Mushrooms, chicken, parm. Possibly the best I've had.

Sitting here afterward, back from some rainy, off-and-on, perfectly warmish wandering, I keep thinking about how strange and interesting time is, and how most of us just live inside this thing we've all agreed to. Whenever I travel across huge time zone changes, I find it fascinating in an almost childlike way. I know what time it is at home; I can just look at my phone. But there's something that never gets old about video-calling my husband and asking what time it is there, like the answer might surprise me.

Time keeps showing up in smaller ways too. It dictates how long we wait for a bus, or whether we walk instead. Some sources said the Latin Quarter was a 15–20 minute walk; it was closer to 40. I'd also read it would take 20 minutes to reach Bailey Hall for the conference, and I found myself wondering whether that was really true, or whether I'd need to build in more time. I started working backward from there: what time I want to arrive, minus the walk, minus breakfast, minus coffee, minus a shower. The same quiet arithmetic I do with my students without ever calling it math.

Jet lag had its own opinion about my schedule. I tried not to look at the clock and trusted I'd wake by 8:00. I did not. I woke up hoping the next morning would go better, and instead of the grocery run we'd planned, my son and I found a wonderful little breakfast spot instead: avocado toast and a latte that tasted like the sweet nectar of the gods for me, chicken and waffles (a bit too sweet, he decided) for him. Afterward we walked the Salthill Promenade, watched for divers who never quite arrived (the tide wasn't right), and I kicked the wall, though I couldn't talk my teenager into it.

Back on campus, I registered for the conference, still turning Euler's i over in my head from earlier, still not entirely sure I belonged in a room full of people who study this for a living. While I waited for my son, I met a man named Michael, here for the conference, from Germany but working in Osaka. I had to resist the urge to introduce myself as "just an elementary school teacher here as part of a master's degree." We just talked for a bit and shook hands instead. What better way to spread a love of math than to have someone like me in the room? It doesn't have to be only the geniuses. It needs the appreciators, the questioners, the ones still new to most of it.

The next morning, time asserted itself one more time before the conference even properly began. I was up before my alarm, on schedule, moving through the fog of not enough sleep, feeling smug about my cushion of time. Until my son knocked on my door in his sock feet to tell me he'd locked himself out of his room. Suddenly my abundant morning shrank into a small, urgent calculation: twenty minutes to walk there, minus a bit for my Achilles tendonitis pain, plus however long it would take to get him a new key card and bring it back. My comfortable margin narrowed into just enough, and not a minute more. Time. Argh.

And with that, key card delivered, son sorted, I made my way toward the opening remarks — still turning over Euler's i in my head, still feeling like the least mathematically credentialed person in the room, with no idea yet what the next four days were about to hand me.