Florida, day one

I spent today with Sarah Ballard's group, plus others, at the University of Florida. I gave a talk, to a large, lively, and delightful audience. At the end of this talk I was very impressed by the following thing: Ballard had everyone in the room discuss with their neighbors (turn and talk) for about 3 minutes, after the seminar but before the question period began! This is a technique I use in class sometimes; it increases participation. After those 3 minutes, audience members had myriad questions, as one might imagine.

I spoke with many people in the Department about their projects. One highlight was Jason Dittman, who showed me gorgeous evidence that a particular warm exoplanet on an eccentric orbit has an atmosphere that undergoes some kind of phase change at some critical insolation, as it moves away from its host star on its orbit. Crazy!

Late in the day I discussed n-point functions and other cosmological statistics with Zach Slepian and Jiamin Hou. We discussed the plausibility of getting tractable likelihoods for any n-point functions. We also discussed the oddity that n-point functions involve sums over n-star configurations among N stars (N choose n), but there are mathematical results that show that any permutation-invariant function of any point cloud can be expressed with only a sum over stars (N). That sounds like a research problem!