I love my job—I teach at a small, highly selective liberal arts college. It is a great place to work. But one thing I miss from my days at big research universities is the constant stream of research mathematicians who give seminars and colloquia.  I am within two hours of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and State College (home of Penn State). Yet, I rarely have the time to make it to the universities there. It is so much easier to get to a talk when it is down the hall, not down the highway.

So, last week I decided to start my own personal virtual seminar. I have scheduled an hour a week to be “seminar time.” During that hour I plan to watch a research-level mathematics talk online.

I spent some time surfing the web and found a handful of sites with the kinds of videos I was looking for. I made a page on my blog to showcase all of these pages. Check out my virtual seminar. Please let me know if there are any sites I have missed (either in the comments here, or in the comments there).

(The great thing about this plan is that unlike an actual seminar in which it is bad form to leave if it is terrible, it is not a problem to quit the web browser!)