Saturday, November 01, 2008

"mathematically, i'll need reinforcements."

all the second midterms have been graded,
part 2 of my seminar talk isn't until next thursday,
and i had all of today to think about research ..

.. so inevitably, today was unproductive.

rather, i thought off and on about one particular problem but couldn't get anywhere. i don't even know whether the answer should be yes or no, which irritates me.

i don't know why i thought it would be easy, because plenty of people have thought about it before. one special case does follows easily enough, but in general ..

.. argh.

the results that i've proven before, they are useless in the general case. i don't know enough-- not about this problem or about topics related to this problem. there's going to be a lot of reading involved, i think;

i won't be able just to waltz in, prove what's what, and saunter out. no: there's some hard work involved. even if i don't solve the problem, i think it may be worthwhile. i'll definitely learn something, get something out of this.

so ..
what papers to print out, first?

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