Another great post by Igor Pak
Apologies for not writing anything for awhile. After Feb 24, the math part of the “” slogan lost a bit of relevance, while the actual events were stupefying to the point when I had nothing to say about the life part. Now that the shock subsided, let me break the silence by telling an old personal story which is neither relevant to anything happening right now nor a lesson to anyone. Sometimes a story is just a story…
My field
As the readers of this blog know, I am a . Not a “proud one”. Just “a combinatorialist”. To paraphrase a military slogan “there are many fields like this one, but this one is mine”. While I’ve been defending my field for years, writing about its struggles, and often defining it, it’s not because this field is more important than others. Rather, because it’s so…
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Combinatorics and more 
A nice complement to this post is an essay Richard Stanley wrote called “Enumerative and Algebraic Combinatorics in the 1960’s and 1970’s.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.07884.pdf.