Sunday, July 30, 2006

a good (but incomplete) work session, and a hilarious excerpt.

personally, i think i know why g.h. hardy was famous for having a 4-hour workday: after four hours of (intense) mathematical thinking, one quickly runs out of ideas and determination.

today's work session felt productive. i identified a few issues about some ideas i had (concerning the geometry behind a particular computation) but i've yet to carry out those ideas.

for some reason, i keep losing my resolve in working those gory details out. they need to be done, and they might clear (or tip over) the first of two hurdles at this stage of the problem. but they remain undone.



maybe tomorrow i will immerse myself in that gore. tonight, i'll read a book of m. kapovich about hyperbolic geometry and discrete groups.

so here is the promised excerpt. (p 32)

3.2 CAT(λ)-spaces

The term "CAT(κ)-space" was (I believe) introduced by M. Gromov in his essay [Gro87] and has nothing to do with cats: CAT stands for Cartan-Alexandrov-Toponogov. I think that the historically correct term should be RAT(λ): Rauch-Alexandrov-Toponogov. However the name CAT(.) is already widely used and, besides, who likes rats anyway ....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Idea: fight procrastination with procrastination. For example, I should be writing up some boring computations, and I really don't want to. However, I should also write a grant proposal, which I like even less. When computations give an excuse from proposal-writing, they get done. :)