In honor of Bernardo Cockburn’s $60$th birthday, the Journal of Scientific Computing had a special issue on discontinuous Galerkin methods. The cover article gives a brief biography and a few personal remarks from a workshop in 2017. It also highlighted Cockburn’s diagrammatic way of understanding the life of a mathematician in the form of an Academica Vitae Complex, rendered below.
Cockburn explains:
unlike the well-known, closely related de Rham complex, the Academica Vitae Complex helps to describe the trajectories of our lives. Indeed, everyone of us steps out from zero to play. After a natural injection $(i)$ into school, most of us obtain a doctoral degree through overcoming a steep gradient $(\nabla)$. Our next stage of life is usually a swirling $(\nabla \times)$ experience in the postdoctoral years before becoming a professor. Decades of professorship, that is, of looking for nice results and avoiding falling into the abyss of irrelevance, eventually diverge $(\nabla \cdot)$ into becoming an emeritus professor. Finally, life comes to a full loop by bringing us back to zero $(o)$ for perpetuity.
The diagram can be generated with the following Tikzcd code:
\begin{tikzcd}
0 \arrow[r] & \text{play} \arrow[r, "i"] & \text{school} \arrow[r, "\nabla"] & \text{PhD} \arrow[r, "\nabla \times"] & \text{Prof} \arrow[r, "\nabla \cdot"] & \text{Emeritus} \arrow[r, "o"] & 0
\end{tikzcd}