Arts versus maths

For anywhere between 25,000 and 1,000,000
you can also be on this Wall of Fame!

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery, or BIRS (pronounce burrs), is located at the Banff Centre, but is actually both a latecomer and an odd one out. The Banff Centre is really focussed on arts: theatre, film, photography, mosic, dance, writing, it's quite broad. They organise courses and workshops and provide a retreat (hence the artist colony). For some unfathomable reason it appears to be more popular in summer than in winter; there is actually not much going on right now. Amazingly, they started all this in 1933, but only after the war did it really take off. Obviously it is government sponsored, but quite a number of companies and individuals consider this prestigious enough to donate substantial amounts of money and maybe get a building named after them; witness the Wall of Fame listing these generous souls.

Thus the short recap of the 1-hour guided tour we received today at midday. It does answer my questions about the nature of this place. It does not explain why a Research Station for Mathematics should be part of it, as it has been since 2000; I think this is a matter of coincidence more than anything else. It also does not explain why a Computer Science workshop should be organised in a Research Station for Mathematics, but you will hear no complaints from me on that account. For a fact many of the participants are quite theoretically oriented, myself not excluded.

BX participants

There are a few workshop locations in Europe I know of that are organised as a kind of retreat, and BIRS appears to have been modelled on those examples. In Germany there is Schloss Dagstuhl in the middle of the woods of Saarland, and in Italy there is a similar venue in Bertinoro, a small village near Bologna. In both cases the idea is that you are somewhat cut off from the distractions of the ordinary, real world and thus inspired to open your mind to new ideas. This is not to say that there are not other disctractions to replace the ordinary ones: the facilities are excellent. Dagstuhl offers bikes that you can take out whenever you want, a sauna, a ping pong table, a music room complete with piano, cello and a lot of sheet music, and a great wine and beer cellar. Here in Banff I have not seen (m)any bikes, but there is a common room with a fireplace, extensive fitness facilities (I plan to try out a spin class tomorrow morning at 6:30), and you can rent cross-country skis. Typically the participants of such workshops are professional enough to allow themselves to be distracted only during evening hours, and in many cases not even then: some of them are extremely single-minded and going strong right now, at 22:00.

Costume atelier: models of models

Today it has been snowing all day, and since it was anyway the first day of the workshop there were definitely no stragglers. Representatives of several disciplines of Computer Science (Programming languages, Software engineering, Graph transformation, Databases) have been brought together to discuss Bidirectional Model Transformations (BX for short). Maybe I'll try to explain a bit about the topic in one of my next posts. 40 scientists in total, from all over the world, 1 female (which is exceptionally few even for a Computer Science event), average age over 40. This is the group of monomaniacs with which I will spend the next four days. Let the good times roll!