I finally finished a write-up of my work from the last month or so. I think it took a year or so off my life. Maybe from now on I should LaTeX the results as I prove them, and save myself those nights of brain-disintegrating toil.
I wonder if my advisor will read it, at some point. Maybe I should have done something else, these last few weekends.
Today was the first day in which nobody came to my Office Hours. It was quiet and pleasant and I got a bit of work done, but strangely enough, I actually missed the student questions a little.
I must be getting soft.
There are some results in mathematics that everyone's heard of and which you never expect to worry about. Take J. Milnor's result on differentiable structures on the sphere; it serves as a moral to those who study manifolds that smooth structures can be very, very strange and eerie algebraic topological invariants may arise out of the ether.
But does anyone ever look it up and read the paper? I never thought I would. But guess what: I'm reading it for Thursday, as a suggestion of my advisor.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Milnor, eh?
Well, once more into the breach, my friends. Until later.
1 comment:
i know of instances in which the statement of the theorem has been warped in a perverse game of "mathematical telephone" (like the children's game) because, well, everyone just knows what was proved so no one actually reads the original. a wise man that advisor of yours is.
Post a Comment