# What I Do

Sometimes people ask me why I started this blog with WordPress, instead of Blogspot or one of the other services. I sometimes say that it’s because of the $\textrm{\LaTeX}$ support, in case I want to start a new blog devoted to math. TeX is a professional typesetting program originally designed by Donald Knuth, and LaTeX is one particularly useful and common extension thereof. It is professional in the sense that it obeys all the rules of beautiful typesetting, which is especially important in mathematics, where subscripts, superscripts, and strange symbols are all commonplace. For instance, the formula $\sum_{n=0}^N \phi_n = 0$ looks exactly like it should, and I didn’t have to fiddle around with some equation editor to make it like that.
Someday, hopefully before too long, I’ll have enough material to write a thesis, and I’m counting on my LaTeX skills to help me out then. In the meantime, I prioritize my research. I’ve given a couple of talks recently on topics close to my research. I gave one of them last week for the Undergraduate Math Club, and the other one at the Williams College/SMALL reunion and mini-conference this past summer. I think that the slides do a good job of summarizing the talks, so here they are: