Siler studies shapes, not students

Although UIC prides itself on its faculty, many of whom have been recognized in research and have won teaching awards, there are also the graduate students. These are the people who assist in the award-winning research and provide help and support for students when professors cannot. The Chicago Flame had the privilege to interview Michael Siler, a math TA at UIC. Siler is also a researcher focusing on low dimensional topology, hyperbolic geometry and geometric group theory.

Flame: What Ph.D. program are you in?

Michael Siler: That's in the Math Statistics Computer Science Department and in particularly I'm in the pure math program.

Flame: What has your experience at UIC been like?

MS: It's been good. It seems like other grad schools I've been to.

Flame: You've only been here for a short time?

MS: Yeah. This is my second year here. Before here, I've been in Indiana University for two years and gained my master degree.

Flame: What brought you to UIC?

MS: So I was at IU [Indiana University] and I planned on staying there to get my Ph.D. But sometime after my second year, I got married and my wife is going to start grad school. UI wasn't very good for what she did in particular, so we applied to whole bunch of schools around the country. And we lucked out with her getting into Northwestern and me getting into here. So we can live together in the same city, which we had been doing two years before.

Flame: What inspired you to be a math major?

MS: When I started as an undergrad, I was a physics major. I always liked science and technical type things. So, I started as a physics major and then in the first couple years as an undergrad I was taking physics courses at the same time I was taking advanced math classes because I liked math as well I have to take some courses. Math class seemed to be way cooler. In physics class it seemed like everything they were doing came down to coming up with guesses that matched data and there was no way of really knowing if it's right or not, just whether or not it matched the data. Whereas in math classes, everything is concrete. Everything is certain. There's a right and wrong answer. Everything can be proven definitely and I liked that. I like that there's no guessing. What you knew, you knew for real.

Flame: What kind of research are you involved in here at UIC?

MS: I do research in a field called topology. In particular, I study something called a 3-dimensional manifold. It's an example of topology that's one of many things topologists might study. Topology is sort of like geometry. In fact, I do a lot of geometry in my work. So a 3-manifold is a type of 3-dimensional object that you might want to study its geometry.

Flame: So what kind of crazy shapes are you making with this 3-D manifold?

MS: Well, shapes I couldn't draw for you. We often study them in terms of schematic drawings because there's no way to actually draw them themselves. A lot is sort of difficult, thought experiments and trying to imagine them in complicated spatial relations. For example, in our calculus class we draw things that are in a plane that we call graphs and all. So you can also think of 2-dimensional shapes or 3-dimensional objects just sitting in space like the pen sitting here in front of me. But I study 3-D objects that are so complicated that you can't make them - they can't be made inside the pretense of the world. They could have only lived in higher dimensions. You can put them all in 6-dimensions though. I can say that. I know it sounds crazy and the fact that you can make them in 6-dimensions isn't entirely important for anything that I do but it's just a cool fact.

Flame: Can the shapes be made possible through technology in the future?

MS: That question doesn't really apply to us.

Flame: Do you use computers to computer-generate it?

MS: You can but I don't. Not yet anyway. But there are some calculations that can be done on these things on computers. The hard part is how to figure out how to do the calculations by hand, and then you can make a computer to do it.

Flame: So do you have chalkboards full of equations like in the movies?

MS: No, the movies aren't entirely accurate about that. There's less equations involved in what I do then you might think. There are more pictures and lots of attempt to describe spatial relations using words and symbols rather than drawings because [like I said before] many can't be drawn so you have to try to find a way to concisely explain what's going on in some picture with words.

Flame: Do you have any hobbies or interests?

MS: I play racquetball. I'm an avid racquetball player. I used to have hobbies. I lost them when I entered grad school. I used to enjoy fly-fishing. Not so much lost interest, lost time would be a better way to say that. When you're under grad school, you tend not to do much else.

Flame:What do you do in UIC other than research?

MS: I teach [as a TA] in Math 180 this semester. It changes every semester. I used to take classes as well, but I'm far enough along that I don't take many classes anymore. You take classes in math for the first three, maybe four years of grad school.

Flame: So you also work at the Math Learning Center at SEO 430?

MS:Yeah. So part of the job of being a TA is that we're required to spend two hours a week at the Learning Center, helping anyone who comes in with math questions.

Flame: What is the status of your TA contract in light of the grad student strike at the UIUC campaign?

MS: Well I think that the status of our contract is very much up in the air. It's currently being negotiated and right now we don't have a contract, our last contract ended. And now we're negotiating a new one that's kind of going slowly.

Flame: What will you do in the future?