Ross loved many many things and math was a particular love we both shared. Both of us had undergraduate degrees in math, but we met at the beginning of graduate school in a PhD program in economics, not math. Why? Because in 1975, economics seemed like a vastly more practical choice. There were far more jobs for economists than mathematicians.
But both of us loved math anyway and did it just for fun in various ways. In fact, the year before he died we enjoyed a nightly ritual before bedtime where I would read aloud from a mathematically fun Japanese novel called Math Girls, which I learned about from Math Mama's blog.
And Ross was very supportive of my amateur mathematical adventures like founding and advising the Albany Area Math Circle, doing Guerilla Math Circle outreach activities and other such mathy stuff. In fact, just two days before he died, he was on one of his solo walks around the neighborhood on a fine spring day and a guy came up to him and said, "Excuse me? Are you Mary's husband?" and Ross said "Yes???" and then the guy hugged Ross and shook his hand and thanked him profusely, saying that his daughter was headed to MIT next year and that it never would have happened without our math circle. Anyway, Ross came home and hugged me and told me how good that made him feel.
And then, the next day (which turned out to be the day before he died, though of course we had no way of knowing that was coming), our math circle had its end of year picnic and the students wound up deciding to built a really large tetrahedron and they were so excited about it that they didn't want to take it apart at the end of the picnic, so one of the moms with a large minivan brought it back to our house and a couple of students managed to get it up the winding stairs from the garage (with a bit of minor disassembly and reassembly) and into our family room. And Ross loved seeing the students' excitement about the tetrahedron as they brought it into the house and then every time he walked by the tetrahedron on what turned out to be the last 24 hours or so of his life, the tetrahedron made him smile. He liked living in a house with things like a giant tetrahedron built by math-loving students in it.
Anyway, the next day he left this earth and since then I have been faced with the question of finding a reason to keep on living in as joyful a manner as possible.
I did not want to continue running the ocnsulting firm we had run together. Economics is known as the "dismal science" for a reason. I do feel our work did some good, but I couldn't continue it without him.
So...instead I decided to *seriously* undertake graduate studies in math. It hasn't been easy. I started out with a graduate class in real analysis in fall 2013, studying a subject for which I'd taken the prereq (undergrad real analysis) forty years earlier! There were more than a few cobwebs in my brain, but I loved the challenge. Then in spring 2014, I took graduate abstract algebra--more cobwebs. What they say about abstract algebra is that it is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in a completely dark room. But for me (given the number of years since I'd taken the undergraduate course prereq to the graduate class in abstract algebra), a better analogy is that I felt like I was doing a jigsaw puzzle in a completely dark room WHILE WEARING THICK MITTENS!
But I persevered and learned a ton--not only about math and the process of learning. This past year, I have been taking a two semester sequence in the theory of statistics. It's been challenging but illuminating. One difficult issue for this most recent class is that I really never had the undergrad prereq class, so unlike the previous year (when I was just dusting off cobwebs in my brain) I was largely working with a lot of completely alien theoretical concepts.
I have decided to use this blog to share more of my journey and my insights as I go.
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