A Pacific Northwest Combinatorics Story. Meet our NSERC- PIMS PDF at SFU, Amy Wiebe.
Ruth A. Situma, Programs and Communications Manager.
Amy Wiebe has gone places, but her heart is truly at home in the Pacific Northwest. Aside from her first postdoctoral fellowship in Germany, the rest of her degrees have been at institutions on the west coast: she completed both her undergraduate and master's degree at Simon Fraser University and then moved down the coast to the University of Washington, where she worked on her Ph.D. under Professor Rekha Thomas. Amy recently began her PIMS-NSERC Fellowship in 2021 and is taking her transition back to Vancouver in stride. Asked about the move back to the west coast from Germany she says “ I was a bit worried about coming back to Vancouver after so many years away actually. I think the hardest part of any postdoc is creating a life somewhere for a few years and then just packing up and leaving it behind. Coming back to Vancouver felt like coming back to one of these unfinished lives in some way, and I didn’t know if it would really feel like home anymore.”
One salient point she notes is the difficulty of creating a life somewhere for a few years and then “just packing up and leaving it behind”. But her return has been much easier because she has extended family living in Vancouver. The anxiety of having to learn a new language is something she need not worry about. “ I tried to learn German while I was there, but it turns out it’s not so easy to learn a language by immersing yourself in the culture during a pandemic. Many people in Berlin speak English, but I didn’t realize I was living with a low but constant level of anxiety about German being the default language until I moved back to Canada and it wasn’t there anymore,” she noted.
I connected with Amy as she winds down her PIMS/ NSERC PDF tenure, and prepares for her move to the University of British Columbia-Okanagan, as an assistant professor in the mathematics department. Her long-term goal was to stay as long as she could, on the west coast, and she has made it happen. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
How has the transition to online work and research been? Has it been easier now that you are doing a second PDF in less restrictive social conditions than your first one in Berlin?
I honestly didn’t find the transition to working online too difficult. I was used to having online meetings from having collaborators in different countries already. Not having to commute anywhere also made it easier to schedule meetings and fit work, cleaning, meal prep, and exercise all into the day without sacrificing all my free time. I could have a seminar until 5:30 pm, go directly to my kitchen to cook dinner, be on time for online German class at 6:30 pm, eat my dinner in class, and still have a couple of hours off in the evening after class. I’m also pretty introverted, so having no social activities meant that I didn’t have to be selective about which social activities I had the energy to attend. But that started to wear on even me after a while. I actually spent some time at home in Canada during fall 2020. Someone in my family got really sick, not with COVID, but it was still a pretty bad time for me. And then when I did go back to Germany after Christmas, that was exactly the time things got much stricter in Germany. Everything was closed except grocery and drug stores, we weren’t allowed at the university at all, FFP2 masks were required on public transit, only one person from outside your household was allowed in your house, and we even had a curfew. There were times when it felt pointless to me to even be in Germany.
But Germany definitely prioritized testing way more than Canada. Eventually, we could get a free rapid test every day at any of the hundreds of testing centers around Berlin. So that really helped things open up because you could start having social events again by requiring people have a negative test. We also had vaccine passports in Germany, so the situations in Germany and Canada were actually pretty similar around the time I moved back. Now that things are opening even more in BC, I’m trying to go to movies and the theatre and comedy shows — things that would be especially hard to enjoy in Germany anyway because of the language barrier. My work life hasn’t changed that much though honestly. Most of my meetings are still online and I feel more productive working from home. I’ve only been to the office maybe 10 times since September. I have given a couple of in-person seminars since we started opening up though, and I have to say I enjoy it much more than a zoom talk!
Your academic career has largely been in institutions in the Pacific North West and in combinatorics. Tell us how you got to this area of mathematics?
Broadly speaking, I call myself a combinatorialist. I think this accurately describes both the sorts of problems I think about and also the way I think about them. More specifically, my recent research focuses on realization spaces of polytopes: given some fixed facial or boundary structure for a polytope, what are all the ways you can assign coordinates to the vertices to get a concrete convex object with that structure. I look at different ways to describe the set of all these realizations and study its structure. With my co-authors, I’ve shown how certain properties of a particular model, called the “slack realization space”, correspond to properties of the polytope, and how you can determine if a polytope with some desired properties actually exists by exploiting the structure of its realization space. I also developed a similar model for matroids. One result that I think is really cool was that we were able to characterize a whole class of projectively unique polytopes — polytopes that have only one convex realization up to certain transformations — by looking at the algebraic description of their slack realization spaces. These types of polytopes are notoriously hard to study. We don’t even know if the list of projectively unique polytopes in dimension 4 is complete!
Even though I was drawn to it because of its combinatorial nature, the study of realization spaces and more generally, polyhedral geometry, is not only combinatorial but also has deep connections to optimization and algebra. My Ph.D. advisor, Rekha Thomas, actually focuses more on optimization and algebra, and in fact, my thesis was motivated by an optimization problem and uses techniques from applied algebraic geometry. I love that it’s such a rich subject area with many tools to draw from and many potential applications. But it’s not actually where I got my start in doing math research.
I did some undergrad research and a Master’s degree at SFU before doing my Ph.D. My research was more design theory-focused at the time. I worked with Jonathan Jedwab and looked at problems motivated by digital communications, and even quantum information theory, but of course, from a combinatorial perspective. I still enjoy studying these sorts of problems, but like many mathematicians, I find there is never enough time to think about all the problems that I find interesting! Every so often I try to come back to the topic of my Master’s thesis. I studied equiangular lines, for which there is a major open conjecture that you can always construct n² equiangular lines in complex n-space. I think a resolution of this conjecture might be my mathematical white whale.
Even though I was at SFU for many years, because my work wasn’t connected to operations research at the time, I didn’t actually interact with my now postdoc advisor, Tamon Stephen, while I was a student. We met at a conference I attended during my Ph.D. where I gave a talk about my work in slack realization spaces. We discussed collaborating on a project he was interested in where he thought my slack realization space approach might be helpful. We never got around to working together though until I applied to do a postdoc with him.
Some postdocs complement their research work with teaching. Were you teaching this semester? What was the experience like and nd what will you take with you to UBC-O?
I haven’t taught any courses since the end of my Ph.D. actually. I felt quite lucky to avoid the panic at the start of the pandemic when everyone had to pivot to online teaching at short notice. Now I think people have learned a lot from the experience of teaching online. I definitely hope to get some advice from colleagues that have been through the process so I can benefit from the lessons they have learned, and my future students can hopefully benefit from the best aspects of both virtual and in-person teaching experiences.
What do you do to balance your research and life? What does a typical Sunday look like for you?
There are definitely times when I do a better job of balancing my life than others. Luckily one of my favorite hobbies involves something that I have to do every day anyway: eating! I’m definitely a bit of a foodie. I love to try out new restaurants, recreate dishes I’ve eaten, and bake all sorts of delicious desserts. Trying out new restaurants was obviously a bit tougher for the last couple of years, so I did a lot of pandemic baking. Normally I would take things I baked into the office because I get bored of eating the same cake for so many days, or I want to bake something new before I finish eating the old dessert. Since I wasn’t going to the office, my freezer ended up pretty full of baked goods for most of 2020–21. Now I pawn off my extra baking on my family and they don’t seem to mind.
I also really love to dance. That’s been my main form of exercise for most of my life. I used to do Ukrainian folk dancing when I was younger. I’m only very distantly Ukrainian by heritage, but I learned a lot about the culture and made many Ukrainian friends through dance, so I’m particularly saddened at all the devastation happening in Ukraine right now. As an adult, I’ve explored a lot of different dance styles. During the pandemic, I really had to push myself to find online classes that I could do at home. It would have been pretty easy to just spend all day sitting at my computer, but that doesn’t feel great for your body after a while. It helped to do classes with friends even though we couldn’t be physically together; it kept me accountable to actually show up. Now that we can do classes in person again, I try to get to 2–3 dance classes a week. Dance is like meditation for me — it’s the one time I’m really able to clear my head and not worry about work or anything else in my life besides what is happening right in the moment.
I took up a new hobby during the pandemic as well. I felt like I needed something to get me outside to balance out all the extra time I was spending working at my computer and not leaving my apartment, especially since I’m not really a typical “outdoorsy” person. One of my friends introduced me to disc golf. It’s basically golf but throwing a frisbee at a basket instead of hitting a golf ball at a hole. It’s definitely my kind of outdoors/sports: you get to chat with friends while going on a nice walk through a park and doing a little exercise by throwing a frisbee. I’m pretty terrible at it, but it’s still really fun!
Sundays have changed quite a bit for me over the last few years. I used to always go to church in the morning, go out for lunch, go grocery shopping, and then do meal prep for the week. But then the pandemic happened, and also, grocery stores are never open in Germany on Sunday. I really try not to work on weekends if I don’t have to, so it kind of became a forced relaxation day. I suspect I will have to go back to Sunday meal prep once I’m back in the office more regularly. But for now, I usually make myself a leisurely breakfast while I listen to a podcast. I often hang out with my family since I’m much closer to them now. And Sunday evenings are for trashy reality TV. We all need some sort of guilty pleasure, right?
What are you glad to rediscover when you got back from Europe?
Grocery shopping on Sundays! Really good sushi! Having a dryer to put sheets and towels in so they come out warm and fluffy! And I know I said I was a foodie but… Chipotle! At the beginning of the pandemic I had this inexplicable desire to DoorDash a Chipotle burrito, which of course, I could not do in Berlin. I’ve been making up for that a lot since returning. Also is it weird if I say the smell? I think of all the cities I’ve ever been to, Vancouver is the best smelling one. Something about the combination of ocean and rain and trees just makes the PNW smell magical — so fresh and clean!
What are you looking forward to, in your new position at UBC-O?
I was always the kid who was excited for the first day of school each year, so I’m pretty excited for the whole new adventure. I’m happy to be joining what feels like a really welcoming department. Getting to live in Kelowna is also a pretty good perk, although getting to live anywhere and knowing I don’t have to leave in a few years is going to be great. But I have to say I’m most looking forward to the potential for new collaborations and the opportunity to create my own research group. I’ve been so lucky to be part of very supportive and productive environments as a grad student and postdoc, and I hope to be able to emulate that for my own students in the future.
Amy Wiebe received her Ph.D. under the supervision of Rekha Thomas from the University of Washington in 2019. She previously received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Simon Fraser University. After finishing her Ph.D., she was a Dirichlet Postdoctoral Fellow of the Berlin Mathematical School working with the Discrete Geometry group at Freie Universität Berlin. Her recent research is in the area of polyhedral combinatorics with connections to optimization and applied algebraic geometry. She is currently an NSERC/PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University working with Tamon Stephen.
Amy will be speaking at the PIMS Emergent Research Seminar Series, on April 20, 2022, at 9:30 AM Pacific. Details on her talk, Non-realizability of polytopes via linear programming can be found here.
