Deciding to “leave the bench” and basic research after committing many, many years to graduate school is not an easy thing to do. There is real pressure from peers, principal investigators (PIs), even parents, to stick it out and follow a more established career path, either to academia or the biotech industry. In my case, I realized fairly early on in graduate school that the traditional optio...

We consider the generating function for a q-analogue of non-strict multiple zeta values (or multiple zeta-star values) and prove an explicit formula for it in terms of a basic hypergeometric series 3φ2. By specializing the variables in the generating function, we reproduce the sum formula obtained by Ohno and Okuda and get some relations in the case of full height.

Borcea-Voisin threefolds are Calabi-Yau manifolds. They are constructed by Borcea ([B]) and Voisin ([V]) in the construction of mirror manifolds. In [SYZ], Strominger, Yau and Zaslow propose a geometric construction of mirror manifolds using special Lagrangian tori (called SYZ-construction below). Using degenerate Calabi-Yau metrics Gross and Wilson show that SYZ-construction works for any Borc...