午夜剧场

My specialization is mathematics, and I primarily research probability theory. However, verifying ideas that arise during research and performing detailed calculations are done in notebooks or on the whiteboard in my office. Furthermore, when learning new things through other people's papers, it is almost impossible to understand them just by following the words on the page. For the time being, I move my hands, transcribing definitions, theorems, and proofs into my notebook to examine them, or performing small calculations for simple examples. For me, it seems that the act of moving my hands to write on paper and the act of thinking are closely connected.

As one of my research themes over the past few years, I have been investigating the long-term behavior of random walks on graphs with periodicity, such as crystal lattices—typical examples being triangular or hexagonal lattices—together with a geometrician friend from my student days. Until this research got on track, we frequently visited each other's universities for discussions, and I quickly noticed that the order in which we drew hexagonal lattices on the blackboard was significantly different. While I would first draw one hexagon and then add copies translated vertically, he would first draw a square lattice, place a point inside each square, and then connect that point to three vertices of the surrounding square to draw the hexagonal lattice. At first, I thought his drawing order was quite strange, but as the research progressed, I realized that this very order was the natural way to understand the harmonic realization, which is the "geometrically most beautiful realization" of a crystal lattice. It was an eye-opening experience. This is a trivial detail that would not have emerged just by following the text in papers or books, but was understood after moving our hands in various ways through discussions with others. I was surprised that a difference in drawing order could so drastically change one's perspective.

At Okayama University, where I worked for 11 years until this March, I gave lectures to students in the Department of Mathematics in the Faculty of Science. When introducing complex figures or new mathematical concepts, I paid close attention to the order of my strokes on the blackboard. Currently, I teach mathematics to students in the Faculty of Economics at Hiyoshi. My impression is that the student temperament is quite different, with many students seeking to efficiently study mathematics as a tool for describing economics. For the students of the Faculty of Economics as well, my trial and error will likely continue as I aim for lectures where the free way of mathematical thinking behind the words in the textbook emerges by moving their hands.