in which i dare the darkness.

tonight i remained in the office longer than i'd have liked. it was necessary, though, because i was dabbling in the dark arts known as algebra ..

.. and i couldn't very well permit that stuff follow me home now, could i?

it would taint the very air, lengthen shadows to sinister darkness, spoil the soy milk and make stale the coffee ..

[shudders]

it's not that i detest all things algebra; for instance, i like lie groups and lie algebras. kleinian groups form very interesting illustrations via tessellation. i also like hilbert spaces and linear spaces in general; the weak-star topology would be nothing without the notion of duality, which is a linear notion.

but outright algebra -- modules over rings and left- vs right-actions and (argh) universal properties (bleah) -- they just makes me uneasy ..

.. in the same way that superman hates magic, or how batman hates moving into action without a foolproof plan [1]. let's face it:

give the villains half a chance, and they will lay a trap for our heroes. the heroes will escape, thwart the villains' nefarious plans, and save the day, but there's always that annoying trap towards a dénouement.

anyway, moving along ..

i also kept muttering to myself this mantra: it's not really algebra, and tried to convince myself that this wasn't evil.

"look's there's a norm! it can't be all bad."

"C^*-algebra is just a convenient name. the elements are functions, and remember: functions are our friends .."

"you're in the commutative case. think: L^∞, measures .. happy things .."

it worked, at least for a little while. but eventually i could bear it no longer, jotted down quickly some remarks on my notes, and left to find .. an algebra book from the science library.

but all's not lost: the identifier "Banach" appears twice on the title, and "module" only once.

still, i would never have thought that i'd need this algebra in order to get my work done.

[1] by this i refer to the grim, gritty batman, and not the pansy batman of the '70s tv show or the joel schumacher-directed debacles. give me a christopher nolan-type batman, or even the gothic batman of tim burton.

in my book, batman should be a borderline personality, whose paranoia and meticulous planning keeps the crime of gotham at bay.