HarryPotter5777

I got introduced to Subnormality a few months ago, and I've been aggressively reading and re-reading all of your strips ever since; thank you so much for what you do!

In the future, what would be your ideal balance between working on Subnormality, PeopleWatching, and other secret projects?

What are your thoughts on spending one's time thinking about natural elementary problems that seem captivating for their own sake (isoceles triangles on an NxN grid seems like one such), versus "serious" mathematical research of the sort that takes a graduate course or two to even understand why someone would care about the problem?

I get the sense that problems of the former sort are often looked down in mathematical research - that being able to explain to a bright 5th grader what the problem is and why it's cool is a mark against the quality of a problem, rather than a sign of its value. At minimum, it seems like relatively few mathematicians actually spend much of their time thinking about such problems, even for the many such which are pretty tractable. This twitter thread on John Conway gets at some of the same thing.

(Of course, if you genuinely love pondering the homology of quasi-monoidal infinity categories or whatever the latest hot topic in mathematical research is, great! But sometimes the thing you're passionate about has practically no widespread interest in "real" mathematics, even if the questions are very natural to ask.)

Are people like John Conway (or their less-talented admirers) doing the "wrong" sort of math? Are the Fields medalists?

• It's a character in the show, not the author. Do you also assume that he only likes two things, the beach and pegging?

• Presumably, there would be criteria for famous individuals (why just men?) and some minimal standard of evidence and/or investigation into possible bribes, which are not things that one can easily summarize in 15 seconds on a date. No need to strawman a position when there are solutions to your proposed problems with a minute of thought.

• A thing doesn't have to be dumb just because you disagree with something in it. She literally says 10 seconds later that it weeds out people who can't handle differences of opinion. Don't be those people.