in memoriam.

as friday turned into saturday i began to think of this weekend as memorial weekend .. not memorial day in the calendar sense, but a memorial day for the advisor.

he died on october 30th. since then, every morning i've woken up, never sure if it would be a bad day. "bad" doesn't mean a bad math day; i don't bother worrying about such things. instead, "bad" means that the mathematics reminds me

• that he died, and that i will never see him again or share in his insights;
  
  
• that he would want me to carry on the work, improve intuitions into ideas and arrange ideas into proofs;
  
  
• that there are more qualified minds than mine. i cannot do justice to what could become an amazing problem or a beautiful theory, if only it were put into the right hands ..

.. but there is no one else. only i was there, in that very time and place, and if the advisor's ideas mean anything, then there is no real choice in the matter.

i have to see them through, but that only makes it harder.

---

i've written before about this weekend, and about the nature of funereal gatherings. one sees family and friends and for that, one is happy. on the other hand, none of us have any illusions about why we are there.

a few friends wrote me early, suggesting that we talk math in the time before the memorial service. the thought troubled me, at first, but then it occurred to me:

with such a critical mass of analysts and geometers, the advisor would have laughed at us if a few theorems didn't come out of that many days of conversation.

so we talked and laughed. we posed a few problems, and we might have proven a theorem: we'll know once one of us decides to write down the proof.

life goes on, i guess. this is not to say it's easy, but it goes on.