by George Mossessian
Among the many mentors and teachers who might have shaped my idea of the Aristotelian good life, only two bodhisattvas have made any lasting impression — my college fencing master, John Mainzer, and my PhD advisor, Abby Thompson.
I met Abby in 2011, my first year at the University of California, Davis, after a sudden realization that I did not in fact want to study mathematical physics. This knowledge struck me in the middle of a computation, some purely peripatetic proposition about transporting vector bundles along the conformal boundary of a space with, of all things, two time vectors. “Who could ever have need of such a thing?” I thought. Later, when I was comparing framed link surgery diagrams in Abby’s office, that same question somehow didn’t occur to me.
Probably it didn’t do so because of Abby’s uniquely humane approach to mathematics and mathematicians. Many of us learn to feel that our worth as a person is tied directly to our mathematical ability. For some, this illusion persists well into their careers, but for most, it eventually becomes necessary to unlearn this. Abby, I sense, never subscribed to such an ideology. We often spoke of math, whether my own work, hers, or someone else’s, but just as often we veered into music, literature, education, or personal matters, and none of these ever seemed less important, interesting, or inspiring than the others. A course was never prescribed in our conversations, not even a research direction, initially a source of frustration for me. But of course, math is just like anything else worth spending a lifetime on; it’s a game, a slow journey of discovery of the self as much as of any fundamental truth, and Abby understood that that game cannot be played without learning to find your own path.
I left academia after finishing my degree, a difficult decision that I sometimes still regret, but that does not mean my time was ill-spent. I may have learned some topology with Abby, and subsequently forgotten most of it, but I also learned that the fabled blind men who feel the individual parts of the elephant are in fact all correct. A person may be a mathematician, and may also be an educator, an outspoken thinker, a musician, a mother, a writer, an observer of nudibranchs.1 It is not that none of these is the whole by itself, but that each of these is a whole in itself. A fitting lesson, given my dissertation topic of common stabilizations of Heegaard splittings — to accommodate the wholes of a fellow traveler, one has only to increase one’s genus.
George Mossessian studied with Abby Thompson as a graduate student from 2011–2016.
