The Show

Recently, I went to a less-than-stellar applied seminar. It was an analysis talk, about bounds of functions etc. The work being presented was fairly cutting edge, and by the end of the talk I understood what he actually did - so in that respect he did an excellent job of presenting, relatively speaking. The 'relatively' is the inspiration for this post. I say relatively, because the talk was a standard analysis chalk talk, and the speaker derived his work on the board. He sacrificed presentation values like style, entertainment, and panache for detail. This is the rule rather than the exception in math talks, but I take exception to it. After the talk, I discussed the presentation format with some grad students, and we decided that it would have been all around a better talk if he skipped all of the derivations, and instead told us simply the results, and perhaps listed the tools he used to get them. This would cut the length of the talk by a factor of three, leaving room for some more polish.

For me a talk is all about showmanship. At a certain level your audience is never mostly experts, no matter how much we like to think they are. Your talk should be a commercial for your work, not a documentary. It should be light, without being superficial, and have just enough information that the attentive viewer learns something about your product. Everyone should understand what you said at the end, even if they could not reproduce the details. Experts should have some questions. You want them to have lots, otherwise you will have nothing to talk about afterwards.

I recently gave a talk called 'America's Next Top Model Equation'. This talk was first and foremost a joke. I was a bit nervous that it would be too light, but in retrospect I could have made more jokes. The metaphor I made throughout was that picking the right math equation is the same as any other contest. It was a fun way to keep my talk cohesive, and non-experts weren't bored. At the end, everyone knew what I had done, and learned something. Self-righteous, sure. That doesn't mean it isn't true. The point I am trying to make is that really the metaphor of a game show isn't a stretch at all. Talks are a performance. It is not just an exposition. It's a show.