my "day off"

after submitting my thesis, i tried to enjoy myself. i browsed through a bookstore, but that only lasted a little. i tried to sit at a cafe and read a book, but i couldn't commit to it.

it was hard to let maths go. so i didn't.

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i did a few mathematical things, none of them too hard. i fiddled around with latex and with my thesis files.

without the rackham thesis template format,
my thesis shrinks from 145 pages to 107.

i'd call that progress. q:

after thinking it through, i wrote back an answer to a mathematical question i received via email about one of my conference talks.

and so it went.


today i woke up, had a cup of coffee, and played around with an idea in efforts to prove a conjecture. i still don't know if it works, but not because i've found a flaw in the logic.

rather, i should say that i have a bad feeling about it. there is a way to decompose null sets in euclidean space -- due to @lberti, c$ornyei, and prei$$ [1] -- and i'm extrapolating from their results.

the idea makes sense, but i can't visualise it geometrically. i have a hard time imagining an explicit nontrivial example. this should <<ping>> on anyone's mathematical radar.

i wouldn't be surprised if the idea is silly and doesn't add any effective structure. one way or the other, i just want to know.

i also leafed through a friend's doctoral thesis.

i must say, it's nice to read maths that's been written clearly and deliberately, like a thesis, that is NOT my own.

this is not to say that i spent the whole day working: hardly that. it's just a difficult transition to stop doing maths altogether.

yesterday i went wall-climbing and went out to the pub with friends.

today i went bike-riding and grocery shopping, and i cooked dinner for myself -- a proper dinner -- for the first time in ages. it wasn't a bad dish, either.

[1] laugh all you want, but this blog should NOT come up as one of the first hits for the reference that i am .. er, referencing. consider it an active vigilance.