where there is a mathematician, there is probably a cafe.

on sunday afternoon i was working at a cafe called la torrefazione earlier .. which, by the way, has great brewed coffee.

in case you were wondering about the notepad, i like writing with the longer edge on the bottom, despite the pages being lined in the orthogonal direction.

the page is otherwise too short:

the side of my hand would be on the table, not on the pad ... which in turn makes forming letters slightly harder to get right.

since the letters are small (and it would be nice to fit in something nontrivial, per page), the hand control becomes that much more pronounced ..

as for what i thought about:

in the late morning i thought about metric currents (specifically, 1-d currents in the plane) but couldn't get anywhere. it's the same obstruction, time and time again: i just don't understand BV functions well enough, at least from a geometric perspective.

as for the afternoon, that was directed towards analysιs of PDEs. i think i convinced myself that a particular strategy is NOT doomed [1] and that i should pursue it further. to do the details, however, means a much closer look at a proof ..

.. and i left my papers and computer at home. oh well: there's always the actual workweek to get work done, right? q-:

[1] the technique i have in mind isn't too strong, in the sense that it won't accidentally "prove" something that is not true in general.