my 3-day visit ended yesterday night, and tomorrow begins a conference at another university. as for today, i'm cooling my heels in downtown chicago.
it's strange, looking for a workplace in unfamiliar territory. this isn't my town, you see.
i recall a few colleagues here and there but, having planned briefly and badly, it would be imposing to call them up now.
i don't feel like sneaking into university buildings, either; on the off chance, i hate being asked to leave, for no good reason.
that leaves one option left: the city library.
that said, the chicago public library is fascinating. the lobby looks like that of a museum, kin to the new york public library, grander than what has been done in the carnegie libraries of pittsburgh.
on floor 4 (the business, science, and technology section) they have a nontrivial collection of mathematics books in their QA section ..
.. granted, i couldn't find anything by maz'γa or by salοff-cοste, but they do provide the fundamentals, such as various books in analysιs, (abstract) algebra, geοmetry, etc.
this place looks like the stacks of a university library .. but for the public. it impresses me. if i were a chicagoan, i'd be proud.
as for the workload today, mostly i'm reflecting on some suggestions colleagues gave me, over the last few days. i think i can improve one of my joint results, which subsequently changes the nature of one particular follow-up project. at first i was worried ..
.. you see, i thought we had found a little pathology, in passing from euclidean to metric spaces, but similarly good behavior persists.
that's good, of course;
then again, i was hoping to show a negative result.
call me a naysayer, but one important point in the analysιs on metrιc spaces is to determine when euclidean phenomena fails in more general settings.
there's still work to do, but now it's more subtle. admittedly, i can't quite tell how it unfold, what factors are really at work.
then again, if i did know, then it wouldn't be research, right? (-:
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