The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 178

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John Mighton
at university, I decided I would have to give up on my dream of
becoming a mathematician. I did not develop the confidence
I needed to return to math at the University of Toronto until
I was thirty-three.
In 1995, when I was in the fifth year of my program, the
Fields Institute opened on the campus of the university, and I
started attending lectures there regularly. It is hard to describe
how lucky I felt to have the opportunity to hear some of the
greatest minds in mathematics share their thoughts on the
very mysteries that I had dreamt of learning about as a child.
When I heard Alain Connes present a new application of
non-commutative geometry in physics (that had only occurred
to him few months before his talk), or when I saw Vaughan
Jones cover a black board with a new calculus of knot
diagrams, or when I heard Steven Cook speculate on some
novel applications of complexity theory, I felt that I was
watching history in the making. I knew that all of these new
ideas—that were being discussed with very little fanfare in the
lecture hall of the Fields—would not only shape the course of
mathematics but would also eventually find applications in
nearly every sphere of science and technology. And I knew
that most of these applications would be almost unimaginably
different from the applications for which the ideas were first
conceived.
In 2000, I was thrilled to learn that I had been accepted
as a post-doctoral student in the Fields thematic program on
graph theory under the supervision of Derek Corneil and Mike
Molloy. In my first year at the Institute, after I had attended
many lectures and taken part in many discussions with my
fellow students and my supervisors, it slowly dawned on me
that the method I had developed in my doctoral thesis to
compute knot polynomials might have broader applications
in graph theory. That year, in the hallway of the third
floor,I also met one of my mathematical heroes, William Tutte,