Last week I attended JMM 2026 for the second time. I did much less math than I did last year. But it was still exciting.

Table of Contents

Math

Last year, I went to too many talks. I barely understood most of them. This year, I chose less. I went mostly to talks meant for a general audience, and I stayed in one session instead of running between many. I did understand more math than last year, but that’s probably because I know more math now, not because my strategy worked all that well.

Here were my four most favorite talks:

• David Ben Zvi: What is the Geometric Langlands Conjecture About? This was my favorite talk. I spent a lot of time thinking about this topic through a representation theory perspective two summers ago while watching BMPSW, but I hadn’t touched it since. More importantly, I had never seen the analytic side of the story at all until this talk: what is this crazy idea of categorical harmonic analysis with direct integrals??? There's a dictionary that matches Hilbert spaces with derived categories? I need to learn more of this.
• Tomer Schlank: Stable Homotopy and Higher Algebra. An extremely well-given talk full of ideas I haven't seen before. Stable homotopy groups of spheres are such a fascinating topic. I need to learn more about Ravenel's conjectures and chromatic homotopy theory someday.
• June Huh: Projection Areas of Convex Bodies and Homology Classes of Algebraic Surfaces. This talk was so elegant. It’s easy to feel like all the simple problems in math are already solved, and that real progress only comes from climbing higher and higher levels of abstraction. When I hear about famous people in algebraic geometry, I imagine endless layers of heavy theory. Perhaps the most important takeaway I got from this talk was a reminder that there are still so many simple, beautiful questions waiting to be explored, and I just need to keep looking for them.
• Bruno Nachtergaele: The Mathematics of Topological State of Matter. Most of this covered ideas I had seen before, and some parts leaned too heavily towards physics for my taste. I would have liked a more detailed survey of the hardcore representation theory behind everything, but overall I was pretty satisfied with this talk.

Outside of these four excellent talks, the conference felt oddly organized to me. Last year, I spent most of my time in the representation theory related sessions. My favorite one was on homological interactions between commutative and noncommutative algebra, and there were plenty of talks that looked extremely interesting to me to the point where I had a lot of difficulty choosing. This year, that whole area seemed to disappear, replaced by much narrower topics.

There was very little representation theory, except for a special session on tensor categories in characteristic $p$, which I barely know. The commutative algebra talks I attended felt closer to graph theory than to the algebra I had hoped to see. Even the poster session, one of my favorite parts last year, repeated the same narrow themes and was tucked away at the far back of an overcrowded room. I was excited to finally see that Geordie Williamson was giving a series of talks (the major figure behind the Soergel bimodules that I spent so much time thinking about), only to discover that all his talks were about AI.

I ended up spending most of my time in the special sessions on quantum/symplectic topology and quantum topology. The quantum topology session was strange as well: half of the talks I saw were straight up skein theory, with no emphasis on quantum invariants or representation theory at all. The only session that matched my expectations was the symplectic topology session, which was great. I do have one regret: At one point, I skipped a talk in this session that looked boring, only to come back for the next one and realize they had apparently been doing ttgeo (a subject I thought about in Germany last summer). Damn, I should have gone to that one.

I should probably mention that I gave my own talk on some research I’ve been working on for the past year or so. I had a 15-minute slot and barely prepared, since I had already given it before. I spoke a little too fast, but otherwise it seemed to hold together and make sense. Surprisingly, far more people showed up than I expected: many were quite senior, or people I knew but hadn’t realized were at the conference. I didn’t know older folks even attended the undergraduate session.

Other

The most memorable part of the conference was simply spending time with two of my friends I’ve known since 2022. Both are incredibly smart, and it felt really good to catch up and hang out with them again.

Honestly, I didn’t do much else. I went to a few social events, but I didn’t really socialize beyond the people I already knew. I didn’t explore DC at all and barely went out to eat outside the hotel. There were breakfast and dinner social events hosted by various organizations, but I mostly just ate without talking much.

Even though I didn’t do much, I somehow felt like I had no free time. Last year, I managed to attend a ton of talks, explore the city, and eat out, and still felt like I had plenty of time. This year, I barely left the hotel, and yet the days seemed to vanish. I didn’t even walk more than ten minutes outside, and still it felt like the conference was over before I had a chance to really take it in. Where did all of the time go?