a few wishes.

i wish i could summon up the will to continue working, even though it's likely unwise to do so.

the latest progress in my thesis work [1] feels like its in tatters. the weekly meeting is tomorrow .. well, provided that the advisor happens to be in the office.

i never expected that working in two dimensions would be this .. frustrating and trouble-prone. i've examined a handful of various methods of boundary extensions to homeomorphisms, but none seem right for the role. each has some defect which ruins any progress.

it's funny: in potential theory, the minimum order of discussion is often second-order. even in the crowded world of elliptic theory, the simplest papers discuss variations on the laplacian and the dirichlet problem.

however, the quasiworld is a first-order world. in particular, the beltrami equation is a first-order equation (albeit with measurable function data) yet surprisingly interesting.

trying to find middle ground is arduous work. it's either that or i'm simply not clever enough to see what simple framework lies hidden from plain sight.

argh ..........

i wish i were more clever.

my first thought was: if i were more clever, i could get work done more quickly, and being more efficient, i wouldn't have to spend so much time working and obtaining nothing for my troubles.

my second thought was: even if i were more clever, i'd probably "push the envelope" and work more. so doing, i would exhaust the use of that additional cleverness, which means that i'd wish i were even more clever.

my third thought finishes the induction: maybe it would be pointless to be more clever, after all. at best, it would be a temporary burst of efficiency and then more of the same.

my fourth thought was: i still wish i were more clever.

my fifth thought is: i wish i realised sooner that "more clever" is grammatically wrong. as it happens, the correct form is "cleverer."

i wish i had this job. the description is from the harmonicanalysis group at yahoo.

Date: Mon May 1, 2006 1:14pm(PDT)
Subject: post-doc at the university of vermont

The Department of Mathematics at the University of Vermont has an opening for one post-doctoral position in analysis for the academic year 2006-2007. The salary for the year is $47,000 (my chairman says it's "about $47,000") and the teaching load is 2 courses/semester. This position might be extendable to 2 years, but that will depend on funding.

I apologize for the late notice on this. We only learned about it very recently ourselves.

despite the bitter of winter in the u.s. northeast, imagine living in burlington and being paid to do maths. having visited that town twice, i'm envious of who gets the job. (:

[1] technically, this is a tangential aside from the thesis problem. in some sense, i haven't been working on the actual problem since .. late last fall.