According to Webster, a professor is the highest-ranking teacher. According to me, a professor is a lifelong student. According to academia, a professor is a person who attains a PhD, but who says certification is a linear process anyway? Time surely isn’t.
Hi, I’m Jas the Physicist, that’s my stage name at least. You could call me Jas, the Physician, that’s my life goal or you can call me Jasmine. In 2017, Reddit called me the mAAd Professor.
Just like the rest of us mathematicians, I was gifted in mathematics at an early age, and continued along that path. I stuck to mathematics because I love it, there’s no doubt about that, but I also had something to prove. Forgive me, I speak in puns pathologically, it’s part of the autism, or any class of schizoid disorders which I have discovered to be topologically equivalent in neuroscience, but I’m getting a head of myself.
Alongside mathematics, I wrote academically and causally online, and have a publication record that rivals professors in academia currently, save for my reluctance to publish them in any academic journals, but the drafts are archived.
So back to my mAAd Professorship, which stands for Music As Alternate Discourse, and was an online school of music philosophy that I built while in a Master’s program in Mathematics at the University of Washington. I would like to emphasize this point, because I don’t think I even appreciated the amount of work I was outputting at this time: I was publishing “papers” alongside taking core courses in graduate mathematics (algebraic topology, differential geometry, and commutative algebra), on top of teaching undergraduate integral calculus (I wanted to teach linear algebra but never got the assignment unfortunately), while researching algebraic topology as it applies to neuroscience, where I opened up a diagnostic psychiatric consulting firm JAS THE PHYSICIST PC. I formally established this in 2020 of this year.
I would also like to point out that a master’s student and phd candidate at UW are no different save for the amount of funding they are guaranteed and whether they want to take preliminary exams first or second year. The workload, courseload and interactions are indistinguishable and I say that to say I was essentially a phd candidate, but again these labels are sometimes overly confining.
I’m not going to say that I did all of these things well, because among my prolific output (and I’m not tooting my own horn here, I am being objective about my capabilities), I was also psychotically depressed, in and out of hospitals and battling homelessness on top of income insecurity. That was one of the downfalls of living on a graduate student’s salary with a professor’s level work ethic, and I will not make that mistake again, because it was inefficient and worst of all it left me exhausted and ill.
In April of 2020, I decided I was finally going to leave the UW mathematics department in search for a more flexible and interdisciplinary position, but it was necessary the four years of graduate courses I studied because I need to understand both algebraic and differential geometry enough to be a conversational geometer in a research and professional setting, so that any conference I attend on these subjects I can follow and contribute to meaningfully. UW is particularly strong in algebraic geometry and I am glad to have learned from wonderful geometers and category theorists but it wasn’t enough.
Okay, are you still following along? In 2019, I began studying partial differential equations as an extension of my research in differential geometry, that is when I started reading the work of professor Yu Yuan and Gunther , two of the only PDE and analysis professors in the department,
THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS IS WRONG.
I CAN PROVE IT.
Now, please accept me as Professor of Mathematics so that I may have access to the resources, scientists, labs and technology to prove this.
I have been studying independently for years, many subjects across various disciplines. I am a polymath, and so when I was forced to spend 16+ hours a day on abstract mathematics, I rebelled. I could not dedicate all of my time to one subject, THAT IS NOT HOW DIAGNOSTICS WORKS
I don’t just want this job. This is my life. This is what I do. I love and enjoy it so much, I enjoy researching and teaching and reading and lecturing that even when I’m unemployed, even when I’m homeless, even when I’m suicidal, I still do these things. I have been teaching for over 20 years. Don’t believe me?
Every class that I’ve been in as a child until adulthood moved too slow and so I would always host extracurricular activities so that I may teach my classmates and reinforce the information for myself. I just loved learning that much. Now I was young when I wrote this little sentence but imagine having a child write that they are teaching the other children to read? That’s impressive, right? This pattern of teaching while learning and doing independent study is precisely what a professor is, and I am one. I just need a school that will allow me the freedom to pursue my research and hunches with reckless abandon, without poverty constantly holding me back.
I found out about the Institute for Advanced Study some time in 2019 when I was perusing one of Jacob Lurie’s recent papers in category theory. After reading its mission statement, and learning the extensive history of the Institute and the minds who attended and professed there, I knew that was where I was supposed to be. It’s exactly the intellectual refuge I had only dreamed about, and I had no idea a place like this existed.
I belong here, and I won’t let external circumstances dictate my exclusion. You say you want exceptional professors, well I’m here to say that I am an exception and all I ask is that you make one for me.
And don’t even get me started on Navier Stokes… my goodness.
However there is much research that needs to be done. I’ve begun recording online lectures on YouTube for the MCAT (Medical College Admissions Test) where I detail subjects including biochemistry, organic and inorganic chemistry, mathematics and physics, both as a means of exposing myself to this material for my own research and because I know the demand for these subjects are high, where medical researchers are needed now more than ever. It is something I do in my spare time, when I’m not searching for jobs. My business (JTP PC) is currently receiving unemployment benefits and I live paycheck to paycheck. Again, this is another unnecessary stressor and impediment to my research. I never stop researching, however, I really want to emphasize that I never stop researching no matter the circumstances. It’s a drive that I have, that I can’t necessarily explain, but moves me beyond words. Okay, I’m getting a bit corny here, but I know there are passionate researchers around, that’s one of the reasons I chose this location. I anticipate nothing but fun and engagement.
I have an small archive on Reddit of articles that I want to read for my research but have been paywalled out of. I know Princeton has access to all of the cutting edge research articles, research databases, computer technology so that my online lectures can be better formatted, chalkboards galore, it really is a research paradise.
Mental state: low carb, raw dairy, raw milk