Good Lectures + Good Food

On Friday, I skipped the problem solving session for my topology course in order to attend the Kristine Bonnevie lectures, which turned out to be amazing and inspiring. The first speaker was a woman who is a professor at Princeton who was trained as a mathematician and works in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Her talk was titles "The Geometry of Ecosystems in a Changing World", which basically meant a discussion of regular geometric patterns that emerge in natural systems. Specifically, she talked about the way that plants organize themselves when there is limited water, and how including termites in the equation changes the drought resistance of the system. SO COOL!!! Also, proof that mathematical ecology is actually a field that people do work in!
The second speaker was a professor at the University of Bergen, also a mathematician, who was talking about how to communicate unknowns in science. His talk included a discussion about the large errors in climate models and how to communicate that fact to policy makers while simultaneously convincing them that they should fund work in climate modeling. Again, so cool and proof that that there is work to be done in modeling climate change, and communicating work in mathematics!

This weekend, there is a food festival called "Matstreif" going on in downtown Oslo. I have been twice so far, because food is incredible. There were so many booths offering samples of beautiful cheeses, cured salmon, reindeer sausage, norwegian apples, flat breads, cookies and more. I also bought myself a fish burger and some lavender ice cream the first day (SO GOOD!) and a salmon burger and a pancake type thing with cream and blueberry/ lingonberry jam (SO SO GOOD!!). Just a beautiful event for anyone who loves food really.

My running discovery of the week was the chapel in the forest that is in Nordmarka, which I stumbled across on a long run that I went on without any specific route plans. I was telling a friend that I had found it, and they replied "Oh, cool! Where is it?", to which I had to reply that I really had absolutely no idea.