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My travels in early 2001: Andrew Hodges
Re-entry to America
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Gran Canaria: pages 1 | 2 | 3
America (east): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
America (west): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 and page 10
More pages will follow.
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Wednesday 7 February 2001
I wake in the middle of America
I'm invited by Adam Helfer to give a basic Turing talk in the Mathematics department at the University of Missouri. Adam was a doctoral student in my research group at Oxford when my book was published in 1983.
As always I am looked after very well. I'm taken to lunch by Jan Segert and see these excellent murals in the restaurant.
it's the art of WORK
America works
Main Street, America again
déja vu
Have I been here before? I'm puzzled, then I place the memory of those vapour trails in a Mid-west campus sky: it comes from a film made some twenty years ago, with a nuclear war scenario set in Lawrence, Kansas.In the motel, I learn from the television that Ronald Reagan is 90.
Thursday 8 February 2001
déja vu again
The next morning, I give another talk in the Mathematics department, this time on my research in twistor theory. I would like to explain how in 2000 Roger Penrose found an idea coming into his full twistor description of gravity which, at last, showed some connection with my twistor diagrams for quantum field theory. But, as always, an hour is nothing like enough even to explain the basic ideas of twistor theory. In 1976, Roger Penrose found the first half of a twistor description of gravity. It's virtually impossible to convey in a seminar what has happened since in the 25 years since then, even to people who are real experts in geometry.
For lunchtime I join the folk in the LGBT group office. Suddenly, I feel back to those 1976 days when I helped reorganise the student group at Syracuse. I'm greeted by news about Bush abolishing the lesbian-and-gay office that Clinton set up. And John Ashcroft, the new Attorney General, setting a right-wing tone on gay rights as on other issues.
Europe seems to have changed so much more decisively. But, from my 1976 experience of American grass roots, I know that the Bush and Ashcroft are not going to have everything going their way.
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The limo service picks me up and I'm driven back along the I-70 to St Louis airport.
There I meet Bryan Ross. He wants me to give a talk at his college in Illinois.
So... I set up another tour for April 2001 — and this time I will go on from St Louis to San Diego and San Francisco.
Meanwhile, in the wet Chicago evening, America lets me go.
A D V E R T I S I N G
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Doing research? Try us for
books,
computers,
scanners, or
monitors.
Or try to relax with a
chart CD,
pop CD,
dvd,
video, or
bottle of wine.
Escape it all with
flights,
a hotel,
holidays in europe, or
short breaks.
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