Newswise — Robin Walters went from Harvard to UChicago by way of Pixar Animation Studios in California.
During his year as a resident technical director in Pixar’s stereographic rendering department, Walters helped to re-render the first two “Toy Story” movies for 3-D viewing. UChicago’s Mathematics Department had already accepted him into its graduate program when he was accepted into the one-year program at Pixar. So there he was, one foot in the movie industry, the other in academia. Which way would he go? Toward Buzz Lightyear or toward quantum groups?
“It wasn’t hard to decide to go back to math. It was my plan all along,” said Walters, a 2010 National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. “I did a lot of interesting things out there, but the movie has to get made.” Sometimes that meant performing some important but tedious tasks, such as painting a shirt over a character’s arm frame-by-frame to fix an incorrectly rendered scene.
In academia, meanwhile, he has more freedom to pursue his intellectual interests. He proposed to the NSF, for example, that he study representation theory of quantum groups, quantum cohomology of quiver varieties, or the Hitchin fibration. “These are three different, not necessarily related topics,” Walters said. Walters became interested in representation theory during his junior year, while taking a class from Thomas Lam at Harvard. The next year, Walters wrote his senior thesis on representation theory of quantum groups under Lam’s supervision. “Robin’s senior thesis topic was quite sophisticated and modern,” said Lam, now an associate professor in mathematics at the University of Michigan. “His previous research was in a completely different area of mathematics, so I was impressed with the speed at which he learned the material on quantum groups. The subject has occupied some of the brightest mathematicians for the last 20 years.” The first two graduate courses in representation theory generally cover material developed in the first half of the 20th century or earlier, Lam noted. But quantum groups emerged in the 1980s from problems in mathematical physics. “They are the subject of a lot of intensive research,” he said.
Mathematically intense Walters plans to add to that intensity. “The incredible elegance of the topic motivated me to pursue further studies of representation theory in graduate school,” he said. Walters chose UChicago for graduate school because of the mathematics faculty’s prowess in representation theory. “I’m really interested in representation theory. They do a lot of that here and in a very interesting way,” he said. “They study things like geometric representation theory here, in which you use the tools of algebraic geometry in the study of representation theory.” It turns out, though, that algebraic geometry is a deep subject of its own. “They do so much algebraic geometry here and we don’t even have a class on it. Why is that? It’s because you have to study commutative algebra for a year and then you study algebraic geometry. You keep climbing the tower.” A resident of Swarthmore, Pa., Walters followed his early interest in computer science to the Pennsylvania Governor’s School of Excellence in Information Science Technology. But he soon discovered a keen interested in pure mathematics, which he pursued at Harvard. Walters recalls attending an information session to help students decide which of three first-year math courses they should take. “If on a Friday night you really want to be doing math problem sets, you should take 55,” they were told. “If just every other night of the week you want to do math sets, then take 25.” Walters took 25, then kept coming back for more throughout his undergraduate career. “I had a fun time,” he said. For him, mathematics takes on a life of its own, just like Buzz Lightyear and his pals in the Toy Story movies.
RSS