I’ve just spent a week (minus one day for the Diplomfeier of the mathematics and physics department of ETH) in Vienna, where the Erwin Schrödinger Institute was holding a May Spring(ish) Summer School on Number Theory. I gave four lectures on sieve methods and recent related results, and found the occasion highly enjoyable. Due to the excellence of the blackboards, I only used chalk, however, so I cannot give links to slides for these lectures. Here is a picture of one of the blackboards available for discussions:
I filmed it, and it took me 24 seconds to walk from one end to the other, which probably beats the previous record (the main lecture hall of the ICTP in Trieste) by as much as 10 seconds.
However, one possibly negative point is that there were no cats to be seen within the confines of the Institute. Of course, they may all be living in boxes hidden from visitors, in various entangled states…
The weather in Vienna was not as good as it could have been, but it still allowed me to get a glimpse of the surrounding history. The E.S.I is located on Boltzmanngasse, and there is a “Kurt Gödel Research Center” very close by. Walking randomly, I also found this plaque:
(Note: this picture is interesting — to me — because of S. Zweig, not because of Hegner, who is not Kurt).
Wow — I counted 10 individual boards in your picture! I’d guess each is about 2.5-3m long so that’s 25-30m of board space.
I wonder if there’s another lecture hall somewhere with even more chalkboards. It’s not uncommon to have 6 large boards arranged in 3 vertical sliding tracks, and occasionally you see 9 boards in 3 tracks (though usually one can only see 2 at once in each track, and one them is fixed). Just imagine if the SI had gone with a tracked setup (the ceiling looks high enough for that), then they could have had 20-30 boards, and you wouldn’t have had to erase for your whole talk…
Yes, there are 10 boards (I just checked on my movie).
But I would think that readability for the audience would become a serious problem with such a setup if they were used for actual lectures! (Whereas the ICTP lecture hall has three huge blackboards in one horizontal strip that can be used for a lecture, the audience sitting sufficiently far back that it’s not too much of a problem). The actual lecture room where I talked in Vienna has 2 x 3 boards (with the middle ones being larger than the two on the sides, which is fairly common also).