short post first: seminar talk woes.

Apart from student-run seminars and analysis-related seminars, I have terrible luck with choosing talks to attend. I might look at the title and abstract, think

"Oh! That looks interesting. I'll certainly go to that!"

and as an afterthought, bring my folder of work with me .. just in case.

It is unfortunate that I have little background, and too often it is the case where the speaker has lost me for good, or that the jumps in reasoning are non-obvious (to me, at least; it is a relative term) and I cannot think fast enough to follow the argument.

It then becomes frustrating: I slip into self-driven ignorance, because I cannot summon the nerve to stop the speaker and ask for a reminder or two of what is going on. Then, eyeing my folder, I slip out my notes out or a copy of a research article and hope that the speaker doesn't mind too much.

One of my commentators from my LiveJournal blog has remarked about this so-called "courtesy" of ignoring the speaker when it is inconvenient to do so, and I don't have a good answer to support or defend this practice.

But should you pay the price of time and confusion because of a mistake in choosing the wrong talk to attend?

Maybe my expectations are too high. Every so often I attend a talk, hoping to learn what the words mean in the title.

I attended an Open Problem Seminar once to learn what a Kähler manifold was, but never found it out. I later asked a friend, who told me a casual definition and now I've forgotten what it is.

Another time I attended a Colloquium in order to learn what a Gromov-Witten invariant is, but to this day I still don't know what such invariants are. I suppose they are hard, if only because they sound hard. q:

But I'm going to try again. I think this is really going to work, this time. In 1 1/2 weeks' time there will be the following Colloquium for the UM Maths Dept:

What is K-Theory and What is it Good For?
Paul Frank Baum
Pennsylvania State University

This is a survey talk on K-theory and will consist of four points:

#1. The basic definition of K-theory
#2. A brief history of K-theory
#3. Algebraic versus topological K-theory
#4. The unity of K-theory

This sounds interesting!

I've heard the term tossed around by algebraic topologists, and it is always a fine thing to learn a new word, though I suppose when most people say that, they mean words like vitriolic or recondite.

At any rate, I remain hopeful this time. The speaker can't possibly avoid saying what K-theory is, right? (;