The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 139

Encountering Mathematics
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also at the University of Toronto, was in linguistics, but it
was clearly interdisciplinary, involving mathematics, statistics,
a lot of modelling, and computer programming. Just before
what turned out to be my final year completing the PhD,
I took a temporary, one-year but full-time, position at York
University, and thus ended my student days, really still quite
mathematically oriented.
As I now discovered—and it remains true to this
day unfortunately—academia loves to tout the benefits of
interdisciplinary study, but as soon as you enter the world of an
actual academic position, you had better be doing something
well defined by discipline. Thus I entered a Department
of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, in its Linguistics
section, which was still very much in its infancy. Building and
administering this program, in addition to teaching courses
within it, soon became a large part of my professional life, and
although my main research program and interests remained in
mathematical and statistical applications within linguistics,
because of those around me, my daily contacts, inevitably I
started to develop additional research interests not involving
mathematics in any way. With only a finite number of hours
in the day, thus began my drift away from mathematics.
Around the same time another drift began occurring: a
drift towards administrative and governance positions. In
serving on committees in the Faculty, in the Senate, and
in other university-wide activities, I began to meet York’s
mathematicians, computer scientists, and mathematical
economists, including some I had known from graduate
school or undergraduate days at the University of Toronto.
Eventually I became an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts,
shortly after Computer Science had left for the Faculty of
Science, but while Mathematics was still mostly in the Faculty
of Arts, which again brought me into closer dealings with
mathematicians, mostly on budget matters but also student