“Thank you, President Connor,” JieMin said with a bow.
“Good day, Mr. Chen. Feel free to call on me at any time.”
Connor got into an elevator and disappeared, while Boortz led his new charge into the math department.
“And this is your office,” Boortz said, opening a door on the hallway. “It’s just down the hall from mine.”
He waved JieMin to enter. There was a desk on one side, with a task chair, and a table on the other side, with two side chairs. The far end of the room was open. The office was perhaps twelve feet wide and twelve deep.
“Please,” Boortz said, waving JieMin to the task chair.
He pulled out one of the side chairs and sat facing JieMin.
“It’s a little small, I know.”
“It seems large to me, Klaus.”
“Well, you’re a smaller person,” Boortz said with a chuckle. “But the secret is that end of the room.
Boortz waved to the apparently empty end of the room.
“That is the projection area, JieMin. It is a three-dimensional display, and much more. You can draw in it, as you do in the heads-up display of the communicator, but in much more detail and precision. It is extensively used in the graduate courses. The ones you haven’t already taken, that is.”
“I see.”
“There is a training piece with it. It runs you through most of the basics pretty quickly. Using the device is simple. What you do with it is up to you.”
Boortz paused as if waiting for a response.
“Thank you, Klaus.”
Boortz nodded.
“Now, I wanted to talk to you a bit about what you might do as you take further coursework. Most of our graduate students are attached to a professor and assist him in his research. But that is not the case for you, JieMin.
“You should pursue the things that interest you. In particular, you may wish to apply mathematics to other subjects here within the university. We call that applied mathematics. There are a number of possibilities.
“Physics is one. They have a lot of interesting things going on there. And physics is perhaps the most mathematics-intensive of all the sciences. But that is just one possibility.
“Chemistry, too, has opportunities. Biology. The engineering disciplines. In applied mathematics, you can work in any of these areas, JieMin, or in all of them.
“I guess what I am trying to say is, Don’t limit yourself. Don’t say, Oh, that isn’t mathematics because it isn’t pure mathematics. Use mathematics as a tool in whatever area suits you.”
“That is a welcome clarification, Klaus. I do not know where my interests will lead.”
“And, in the mathematics department, that isn’t a decision you need to make. You can work in any field in which mathematics is an important tool, which in engineering and the sciences is just about all of them. I would encourage you to take courses in any areas that interest you – physics, biology, one of the engineering fields. Whatever you find interesting.”
“Thank you, Klaus.”
“You’re very welcome, JieMin. And if you have any questions, remember that I’m just down the hall.”
With that Boortz was up and out of the room.
JieMin spent two hours working with the projector device. The tutorial was slow, but as soon as it explained he could adjust the playback speed, he set it to one-point-seven-five times normal speed. That worked much better for him.
JieMin loaded the drawing he had done for Chen GangJie – was that just Tuesday of this week? – and looked at it in the big projection. He magnified it, added detail, showed the water flows, and added a side wall to one water channel at a point it might wash out. He sent that improved version to Chen GangJie.
The Beach
By that time it was almost one o’clock, and JieMin was hungry. He went downstairs and found the cafeteria in the main university building. He got a light lunch and ate it outside in Charter Square.
It was a beautiful day, and JieMin was not motivated to go back up to the office. Instead he decided to learn more of Arcadia City. So he got on a bus – it didn’t matter to him which one it was – and rode in the front seat opposite the driver, just looking out the windows.
At one point, the bus stopped and the driver made an announcement.
“Transfer to the beach bus.”
“There is a bus to the beach from here?” JieMin asked.
“Oh, yes. That bus there goes to the beach as soon as we drop off,” he said, pointing.
“Thank you.”
JieMin got in the line of people getting off the bus and going over to the other bus. He hadn’t noticed while he was sitting in the front of the bus, but some of them were completely nude, already stripped down for swimming in the ocean. Why wouldn’t one just take off one’s lavalava when they got there? It seemed strange to him.
JieMin rode in the front on the way to the beach. Arcadia City gradually thinned out, and then they were in the green space along the beach. He wasn’t sure if that was an enforced green space somehow, or whether no one wanted to build this far from town. Maybe the colony owned this property and kept it so there would be no development here.
In any case it was very pretty, and it was only minutes before the bus stopped at the beach. JieMin got off with everybody else and trekked across the sand.
There was no moon of consequence on Arcadia, and that meant there were no tides. The beach was therefore naturally narrow, but the colony government had widened the beach here so close to the city. Without tides, the extra sand was also unlikely to wash away.
JieMin thought the beach was wonderful.
