## Friday, January 09, 2009

### the early bird gets the research done.

in regards to an earlier comment, lately i have been experiencing the joys of mathematics in the early morning.

take this morning: i woke up at 5:30am, decided that i wouldn't be able to fall asleep again, and then proceeded to coffee and breakfast. by 6am i was leafing through books in fun¢tiona1 ana1ysi$. (as it happens, i defined an ad-hoc bana¢h space yesterday, and it would be very helpful if it were also ref1exive. ) there is one drawback, though. i'm the sort of person who likes his reward after his work. (that's why i prefer to go running in the afternoons and evenings, and not in the mornings.) by "work" or responsibilities, i am referring to teaching. this term, 10-11am: differentia1 equati0ns 2-3pm: (basic) 1inear a1gebra [1] it's hard for me to sit down and think unhindered when i have further responsibilities to meet later. my thoughts are not: great! i have 2-3 hours to think about research. but instead, crap. i have to teach at 10am; i only have a few hours for research. i suppose that suggests a few things about me: that (1) i am a pessimist at heart, and (2) if i can be a slacker, then i shall. there is also the dread of murphy's law: inevitably when one has a good idea, then it's at the last possible second and one has no further time to entertain it. then again, this early morning math might be a better strategy. i often prefer research to teaching [2] and let's face it: time always runs out, and after teaching, i've less energy left for thinking than i would prefer to have. as long as there is time available for new theorems, who am i to complain? in this life, we take what we can get. on a slightly related note, i'm getting more fickle with age, at least when it comes to books and sources. while leafing through functional analysis texts, it was hard to find exactly the right one. note to self: maybe i should invest in a copy of y0sida's book, and for that matter, a copy of ev@ns and 9ariepy's book on mea$ure the0ry and some books of e. $tein. the book list goes on. anyways, i leafed through rud!n and went through his idiosyncracies, i thumbed through r0yden (the middle part) and read lists of facts about bana¢h spaces .. .. and in the end, the one source that really spoke to me were the lecture notes that my advisor wrote some years ago, when he was teaching a functi0nal ana1ysis course. [3] he always did explain mathematics well. so like everyone else, i guess i'm partial to my own mathematica1 upbringing. (: [1] in the course, we'll cover so1utions to systems of 1inear equati0ns, some basic facts about basis and 1inear dependen¢e and determinants, how to diagonalize symmetri¢ maτrices, and how to compute ei9envectors. there are some applications too, but i can't remember them right now. so i'm just saying what this course is: the first lessons one learns in 1inear a1gebra. it's not like we're going to prove the$pectral theorem or anything.

[2] unless, of course, the research really isn't going well.

[3] my postdoctoral mentor is currently drafting notes in latex, which he makes available on his homepage. however, at the time i couldn't access and use them.

call me a luddite, but i still haven't acquired high-speed internet at home.

#### 1 comment:

Leanne said...

I know what you mean on the morning stuff. I'm NOT a morning person. Thanks to depression, I have trouble getting out of bed early. But I think best right off the bat in the mornings, before all the day's to-do lists start cluttering up my thinking. But I have very little time for research, since I'm teaching more than you are and on the market and all that. So when I *can* get up early, I get up and write/research. It's the best time for me and it leaves me feeling good all day.