Sunday, April 15, 2012

uncommitted: no risk, no gain.

[written on friday]

maybe i should have waited until the end of today to submit the article. instead, i did so just before lunch.  it took only 5 minutes to upload and fill out the form.

otherwise, today was wholly unproductive.
Stephanie: What did you do today?
Leonard: Well, I'm a physicist, so I just thought about stuff.
Stephanie: That's it?
Leonard: I wrote some of it down.
[from the bιg bang theοry, the tv show]


when i think about it, most of my workdays are unproductive, in the sense that no stunning breakthrough occurs.  it's hard to say if i've ever had a moment that could really be called a "breakthrough."

i wouldn't call the process of research "continuous" either.  maybe it's like a (1-D) distribution function from probability .. but, of course, that's being rather optimistic:

who says that there is always progress in research? [1]
 


as for particulars, today i felt uncommitted to any one idea or problem.  my mind just started to wander and the rest of me was obliged to follow it.

i thought about curreηts,
then about metrιc spaces,
then returned to geοmetric measurε theοry;

all in all, in 5 pages i didn't prove anything .. maybe a lemma?

i wouldn't point to anything and call it a lemma, exactly.  these were five pages of .. observations, i suppose: the lazy kind of maths, where you ..
  • trace through proofs and examples that you already know, 
  • assume all the hypotheses you need to work through a special case, 
  • trying, all the while, to identify the driving mechanism behind it all.
familiar terrain, you know?
no exploration of the unknown, no real struggle ..

.. and thus: nothing worthwhile earned.




[1] i've lost "theorems" before, due to sloppiness, which would make the graph decreasing on some sub-intervals.

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