- these days i often work at home and it is a fine thing, because i'm then free to be a weirdo and work as i please.
- i'd be free to pace around, maybe mutter to myself, which i cannot do in east hall without acquiring a few odd looks and stares.
best of all, i can bask in the sunlight streaming through my window .. and work like a free man! - but two days ago i was at a loss for a chalkboard, so i fished out my old whiteboards and wrote on them as if they were tabletops. but then i was faced with the problem of having to copy what i wrote on the board .. and then it occurred to me that i could just as easily take a photo.
so here are some photos .. not precisely of the work i did, but of the environs. i get the impression sometimes that my non-math friends think that math all looks the same .. formulae and such .. but in my own case, it's often a lot of writing.
it is a little pride, but i like my handwriting ..
.. though some would say that it seems a little effeminate.
as for where i jot things down,
this is one of my notebooks. it used to have full-sized 8.5" x 11" pages, but one day it rained and the bottom pages were soaked, so it gutted it down to size.
this is another notebook of mine. to explain the cover, sometimes i get a little obsessive with neatness, and this notebook is meant to be used to work the gritty things out, and not for pretty exposition!
then there are legal pads, which is de rigueur for any mathematician. you can tell much of the personality of a mathematician from how (s)he treats a legal pad. q:
whenever possible, i like to take notes on loose sheets of paper and collect them in a binder. in terms of actual physical matter, it's the closest version of digital 'cut & paste' that i know of.
it also makes scanning notes far easier, which is something i've done of late for absent friends and colleagues.
lastly, this is a LaTeX'ed version of my notes. i write such drafts when i feel like i need to say something once and for all.
it does look rather nice, doesn't it? q:
Thursday, February 01, 2007
works and days: photos!
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4 comments:
you can tell much of the personality of a mathematician from how (s)he treats a legal pad. q:
So what can you tell?
maybe i shouldn't have said 'much,' but several things come to mind.
one: how visual details matter to the mathematician. for example, when discussing a problem, lines on paper do not matter to some, and writing is skew all over a page.
for others, lines are always there, in order to keep thoughts in order. my undergrad mentor has very orderly writing; even when discussing a problem, every part has its appropriate place.
i think i inherited some of this inclination from him.
two: content. some use a legal pad for everything; working out research ideas in rough form, taking notes, for discussions with peers .. everything.
others are more specific in their use, favoring legal pads for when something must be written formally and well .. like a seminar talk.
three: occasionally, how the pad is oriented gives some clue. i met one prof who uses her legal pads sideways, because her estimates tend to be long and wouldn't fit on a 8.5" wide line.
myself, i once had this tendency to write with an upside down legal pad and even wrote about it once [link] but that was before i thought of legal pads as single entities to collect many thoughts, instead of a collection of single pages, meant for use.
I much prefer cross-ruled paper to lined paper. It's much easier to draw dyadic cubes on it.
At home, I like to use sheets of old A4 paper (usually used on one side) fastened to a wall as scratchpad --- they're easily changeable and collectable. Huge pile of paper used in this manner helps to convince me that I actually have been researching something once I get to disposing it.
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