last licks, some thoughts.

now the introduction is tolerable. at the very least, i sent it to a few friends; some actually responded and i sensed no diplomacy between their words.

i'm now typesetting and making sure the chapters fit the introduction, and vice versa. this university template is slightly annoying;

too many widows and orphans, i say.

in fixing the typesetting, the page count dropped from 132 to 126 pages.
it's not done yet, either: i'm only on page 82!

then there are acknowledgments and a dedication. for once, i know exactly how to write them.



most days i feel as if i started this thing too late in the game. everyone i know who's defending this year has finished their writing and submitted their thesis.

more than that, it seems that in this field, it's good to write early: papers as well as a thesis.

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as long as i'm on the subject, i might as well advertise a friend's preprint from the arXiv. if anything, mentioning it means that i'll be more likely it read it soon!

Geodesic manifolds with a transitive subset of smooth biLipschitz maps
Authors: Enrico Le Donne - [link]

excerpt: ".. Our main result is the following. Let X = G/H be a homogeneous space of a Lie group G, and let d be a geodesic distance on X inducing the same topology. Suppose there exists a subgroup G_S of G which acts transitively on X, such that each element g in G_S induces a locally biLipschitz homeomorphism of the metric space (X,d). Then the metric is locally biLipschitz equivalent to a sub-Riemannian metric. Any such metric is defined by a bracket generating G_S-invariant sub-bundle of the tangent bundle."

so cheers to enrico: not yet on the market, and two preprints under his belt!