Well, IDK Lawvere (other than from that category book). But it would be interesting to, while young, formulate the predicates you'd like to satisfy when you're old. Renee' and I regularly marvel that we're still alive. When we were young, we couldn't even imagine we'd live this long, much less imagine what properties we might have. I suppose it's that ugly diachronic/narrativity thing again. Like ChatGPT, we can tell ourselves stories about anything. And we'll even believe them. When I was a kid, "story" was synonymous with "lying". "You're not telling us stories, are you?" - a regular question coming from my parents. My response was literally irrelevant. They already had their narrative of whatever I might or might not have done. Whose telling the stories, here?!?! >8^D
"""
He had a great impact on my mathematical life and thought. I considered him a spiritual father and I regret not writing to him before he passed. He was wonderfully generous with his time and his stories were poignant, keeping a target in mind. I suppose I am sharing because it is one of my happiest memories and because I believe the list could use a little less cynicism. There is so much cynicism everywhere.
As to who I wish to be? I am already so completely different from my earliest imaginings; I wouldn't know where to start. Even as of late, my perspectives and thoughts are radically different from what they were months ago. In some ways, this seems catalyzed by a shift away from pure mathematics and toward developing tools for doing science—catalyzed by the overwhelm I feel when confronted by anything I attempt to build that might stand. The specificity and idiosyncratic nature of the phenomena I am studying does a lot to eat through my theorist leanings. I am not an academic; what I am hoping to build must work. The whole exercise is altering my stance. The past appears as a prelude to much less than I imagined. The toy models I and others seem to carry remind me of the useless idols and charms that died in the hands, or around the necks, of the early Christian settlers to this new world. A child's baseball glove in a box of belongings, carried by a woman on her first day of college.
