Category: Rate of Change
-
Navigating the Storm
I felt like I was on top of the world. I had just discovered the final lemma needed to prove a major theorem providing a new bound on the number of resonances on hyperbolic surfaces. But the sound of steel doors opening at the end of the hall dragged me back to reality, back to…
-
That Impossible Goal
Mathematics has always made me feel like I’m connecting with something bigger than my own life. Every time I sit down and engage in my mathematical investigations, I feel I’m peering beyond the boundaries of physical reality, into something infinitely more. Mathematics is the sacred promise underlying all logic, all comprehensibility, all structure necessary for…
-
Dawn
For the first four years of my sentence, I worked to learn mathematics in total isolation. It was my safe, lonely hiding place away from the nightmare in my head and all around me, where I could vent all my frustrations and hopes into something meaningful, tangible… something I could cling to during the most…
-
Reaching Out
Imagine finding your passion in life and then being unable to discuss it with anyone who shares that passion. That’s what the beginning of my math journey was like. After several years devoted to mathematics, I could see the transformation it was making in my life and the promise for a brighter future it gave…
-
How?
Awake in the middle of the night, angling my book to catch what little light streamed in from the cell window… I can’t sleep, not until I understand the expansion of scattered waves in term of resonances. The brief joy might be enough to dampen the dark thoughts and last until I drift to sleep.…
-
Why?
There are certainly people here who fit every single stereotype for the violent convict. But the truth is that many of the people I’ve met in my 10 years in prison are kind, have interests and loved ones. Most importantly, they recognize the mistakes in their pasts and crave the chance at a new life.…
-
A Spark in the Dark
Those first few days in prison were pure hell, as I finally had the chance to process the previous year of my life, and to face the reality of the long sentence ahead. I was barely 20 years old, but it felt like my life was over. There was just this heavy sense of dread…
-
Introduction
My name is Travis Cunningham and I’m here to share my story. I am, first of all, a mathematician. I study scattering resonances, which is a subfield of partial differential equations. I recently published my first paper, in collaboration with my mentor, on scattering resonances for Schrödinger operators in dimension one. I also have three other…