flight plans | collaborations vs. solo works.

every time i board a plane, i forget something. this time, it included toothpaste, contact lens solution, and a copy of one particular paper that i was planning to read.

frustrating!

i brought a secondary reference, a copy of my preprint in progress, and even two papers that were for "fun" .. that is, in case i felt like thinking about maths, but not about any of my own projects ..

but the one paper that really mattered: it had to be that one that i would forget.

over the first leg of my flight i tried to reconstruct the proof. i remembered to include one particular step, but couldn't remember exactly why it was necessary.

by the second leg of my flight, i had grown curious enough to look up the PDF version in my maths_papers folder of my laptop. with only 30 minutes left of battery power, there was enough time to read the proof and think it over. the LaTeXing would have to wait.

good enough. odds are that i wouldn't be able to write it well at the time, anyway.

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on a related note, if all goes well i'll have four more collaborations in the works. that is good.

then again, it's been a while since i wrote a paper on my own.

in my recent work on schοenflies extensions, i can't separate which were my ideas and which were the advisor's.

i'm also loathe to count the paper i cut from my thesis [1]; i can say with honesty that though the advisor pointed me to that direction of study, the driving ideas were almost all mine. i remember the advisor being confused at first, probably thinking i was crazy.. and one day, his eyes widened when he realised why exactly it would work.

you see, he was a hard man to surprise. i never thought that i'd be able to. (-:

anyways: been there, done that, what have i done lately, on my own? the question is still relevant: can i be successful, by myself?

i still feel like i don't know anything. i'm still not good at formulating problems. maybe that explains the collaborations. i'm nearsighted with details, and someone has to point me in a direction to start. \-:

maybe i'll try my hand at (geοmetric) measurε theοry again. i don't know much about it, but it's an area in which i can work alone, comfortably. if i prove something interesting enough [2], then maybe i'll finally write that paper about curreηts.

[1] in retrospect, maybe it would have been a good idea to break it up into two papers. it ended up being 35 pages long, and in two rough parts: (1) building some machinery and some euclidean results, and (2) answering a special case of a conjecture that everyone already knows is true, but with a different proof in mind.

it's been a year since i sent it to a journal, and supposedly it's gone to the referee. is it really that taxing to read? admittedly i needed three distinct theories to make it work, but .. come on. if (s)he thinks it's crap, then at least let me know now so that i can re-submit it!

[2] for now, i have a few theorems, but .. they're somewhat obvious. if i were a referee, i would reject a paper with only those contents.