I talked about some of the sights I saw during last week’s AAG conference in Chicago in an earlier post but here I just want to mention some of the fantastic talks I attended. Quality was very high this year, and not without some controversy.

There were plenty of choices–I’ve heard there were 97 concurrent sessions. So 97 people giving papers at any one time! This is clearly ridiculous. The conference is 5 days long, papers start at 8am and go past 7pm every day. There’s also a full day of papers on the last Saturday, which everybody also complains about (it’s the day most people do their sightseeing, so sessions are lightly attended). An obvious solution to that problem is to have the conference M-F instead of T-Sat.

As for the number of sessions this is a result of the AAG policy of accepting every paper. While on…