embracing the mundane ..

EDIT (AS OF 15 SEPT 2005, 5:30 PM): About the "More Mathematical" part: never mind. I made a mistake while trying to find a mistake, so there are no old mistakes, only new ones.

Despite my worries, which were silly and without much point, the advisor meeting went reasonably well. I get the feeling I should write up some results, and prove new things to further the theory.

Aside from my last post (and before that, an article post, which is negligible), I haven't posted very regularly on this weblog. More than anything, my posts seem to occur in blitzes, and I have a hypothesis on why: it's because my life, even my mathematical one [1], is hardly exciting. Perhaps it takes about a fortnight before something noteworthy happens.

So how do I combat this temporal affliction? I can think of one simple answer, right away: don't wait for the noteworthy stuff; just write a lot of trivial posts! I will embrace and extoll the mundane! It's not like my weblog is really good entertainment, anyways. q:

So today I will tell two bits of news, and one is more mathematical than the other:

More Mathematical

I think I made a computational mistake in the last proof I showed to my advisor, which is both bad and good. It's bad because .. well, errors are inherently bad in academia and in particular, mathematics: they detract from the foundation of rigor and fact that comprises our body of knowledge.

However, it's good because the three of us (a visiting prof was also observing our discussion) were kept mystified at this strange exponent from my Lebesgue theory argument. If you know about this sort of thing - Hölder conjugates and Sobolev conjugates, for instance - then they often take a certain form. This exponent of mine was really out there.

Of course, I have to check again that my mistake is, in fact, a mistake, and that I didn't make a mistake while searching for a mistake.

Zounds! This could be worse than compiling computer programs!

Less Mathematical (but somewhat pertinent)

I was surfing through the Slashdot website and reading idly, I chanced upon this new facet of Google: Google Blog Search!

Impressed, I did the first thing I could think of [2]: I ran a search under my own name. This website was the 38th hit, which humbled me .. and for the record, the first 37 hits are from a UK blog: blog.fatality.co.uk.

So I have a British weblog doppelganger. Huh. From reading a few random posts in May 2005, his also embraces the mundane .. (;

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[1] Some would argue that my mathematical life is my only life, which could be justified: during a semester I might spend north of eight (8) hours in my office in the Department for six (6) days of the week. The parties I attend are mathmo parties, and aside from a few friends and former housemates, I know very few non-mathmos in Ann Arbor. (;

[2] I suppose this betrays a latent sense of vanity in me.