it would be easier, if this social gathering had prerequisites ..

this morning i remembered:

tonight is a dinner party.
the host, a fellow postdoc, invited me.

fair enough; the usual crowd is used to my teaching rants.

then i thought about it: his sig.other is studying in the school in public health at our university. other students, of a professional kind, will be there as well.

ver well, then: don't rant in front of the students. it's bad form.

i thought further:

i might be the only non-applied mathematician there. most of the postdocs in this department are mathematicaΙ biοlogists.

did he invite the logician? probably not;
no butch-&-sundance ending, then.

crap. there's no way out of this, is there?

they'll ask .. they always ask: so what do you do? what is theoretical maths, exactly?

so i'll have to explain myself non-rigorously, using plain language and concrete examples, while not sounding like a physicist or a computer scientist .. and without becoming too dry and boring.

[sighs]

oh well. at least it's a dinner party, not being stuck in a row of seats in an airplane ..