# [2021.06.04] Monthly Seminar

There is a monthly seminar which no one likes, principally because
it's obligatory. Not only the event attendance is mandatory but also
asking two questions after each talk. That means organisers randomly
select a person and make her ask something. Sometimes people can't do
that because our research fields can be distant from each other,
although what we do is broadly related to AI. Today two guys from my
lab spontaneously (and unconsciously, I guess) protested by not even
trying to speak in under ten minutes. They are both mathematicians
and belong to a different culture. They don't create fancy business
presentations. They write formulae, theorems, and they talk a lot
about embarrassingly complicated things. You can give an idea of
what's going on in a couple of words, but that won't be mathematics
as it is. For me, that always was an illustration of sacred and
profane duality. Also, if you don't understand maths, that's it. It
doesn't mean something is wrong with you, nor it implies that the
speaker or the theory failed. One guy told, he wanted speakers to
explain better, particularly when they come from more theoretical
fields. Someone answered him that practical talk is as hard to grasp
for mathematicians as their slides for him. I mentioned that some
attendees were from social sciences, so they were not supposed to
understand the details of what we did at all. That to say, I don't
understand social science articles either, and that's all right. For
me, the most surprising thing was this guy who didn't see that the
problem was not in theorem-lovers but with those who make all of us
present during this execution.