The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 107

A Director Is Not a Dictator
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reproduced quite often, and which has allowed the Institute
to accomplish an amazing amount on what is really a tiny
budget). The two of us had set out on a path of exploration:
to bite off a small problem in multidimensional conservation
laws. This was, at the time, uncharted territory, and our
“irresponsible” semester gets a good deal of the credit for our
initial work. We pretty much ignored seminars, workshops,
and other activities as we battled confusion and ignorance,
learned more about degenerate elliptic PDE than we dreamed
existed, and eventually found a path to the beginnings of a
theory.
The experience impressed me with the usefulness of
a career break where one can focus on a single topic,
uninterrupted by teaching or service obligations, and it showed
me the ways in which a mathematics research institute that
runs visitor programs can affect a mathematician’s career.
After four months in Waterloo, my family and I returned
to Houston, and my involvement with Canadian mathematics
continued at a slower pace. I served without any particular
distinction, as I recall, on the GSC for Applied Mathematics
for a term, on the Fields Institute Scientific Advisory Panel
for a term, and on one of NSERC’s notorious “reallocation”
committees (the one, as it happened, that assigned a very
disappointing funding package to Fields). The reallocation
experience was interesting for the fact that, of the twelve
members of the committee, five were held to have conflicts
of interest with one or other of the mathematics institutes and
were excluded from the discussion. This was hard to explain
to Ken Davidson, who was then the Director of Fields. I think
to this day that he feels personally betrayed. (Sorry, Ken. I
would have done anything I could to help.)
None of this prepared me for being nominated to become
Director of Fields after Ken.
But once I was under
consideration, everything fell into place in a remarkable way.