Cognitive Sanctuaries or: Manifesto of the Department Chair

[This is a guest post by Jess Werk. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Hello, I am Jess Werk, professor and chair of Astronomy at the University of Washington. Astronomy may interest mathematicians right now because our field has already been reshaped by supercomputers and survived to tell the tale. Our magneto-hydrodynamic simulations, built on the Navier-Stokes equations (plus lots of other “subgrid” physics), are run for over a hundred million core-hours, and produce emergent astrophysics that takes us years to understand and verify. They do not replace analytic theory; they complement it. The Rubin Observatory’s nightly stream of sky survey data, petabytes over the life of the project, would be unusable without advancements in cloud storage and AI algorithms. Astronomers were early adopters of machine-learning techniques because we have a whole Universe’s worth of beautiful data, and our space telescopes are built at the…