where the tracks end .. for a while.

EDIT (AS OF 18 JAN '07, 22:39): call me a glutton for disappointment. i never did get to reading or writing. i thought i'd try the theory of currents again, reached a point where i guessed i would reach, and made no real progress thereafter.

maybe i'll learn my lesson by tomorrow, and then turn to reading.

yesterday and today i resorted to methods in standard measure theory, hoping for some 'silver bullet' to the task at hand.

well, i didn't find any.

in retrospect, i don't think i truly expected to find one, but at the time i couldn't think of anything else that could work.

---

the more i see of mathematics, the more i believe this:

advances in mathematical research are not so much brilliant inventions of the mind, as they are taking the right perspective on the problem.

so it's not so much a grand adventure blazed by the intrepid explorer, as it is a road trip and you finally realised that the map is upside down.

at any rate, it would explain why so many ideas seem 'obvious.'

this is not to say that mathematics is easy .. but then again, we do have a reasonable share of the "making people feel stupid" monopoly.

this is not to say that i've discovered something interesting or useful through today's research, either.

instead, i think i realised that i was obsessing, and for the last few days, i've been an @ss and a right jerk.

---

i haven't been eating well and i've been sleeping fitfully and little.
i haven't held many conversations of any depth with anyone, recently.

i've been pondering different aspects of the same idea for weeks, and so doing, digging a rut.

before that, i was seething while home for the holidays, tempted to work but too distracted by familial roles to concentrate on very much at all.

during those days, there was one idea i had and i really hoped it would work ..

.. but it doesn't.

these past few days i've avoided people and crowds. when amongst others, i've been brusque and treated people coolly; fellow math grads have hello'ed me in the hallway and i'd reciprocate but never break stride.

i just feel angry, at random times and places. maybe i'm tired.
i also feel tired.

---

i think i will do something different tomorrow: maybe not research, but some non-essential reading.

maybe now is a good time to start on the ambrosio-kirchheim paper "currents on metric spaces" ..

.. or parse through the cheeger-kleiner paper about non-embeddability and differentiability theorems ..

.. or sift through the literature of optimal transportation and related topics, say the lott-villani papers ..

or maybe i will start writing. it's been some months since cincinnati and my talk about the schoenflies problem.


the key is to do something that doesn't really matter. if it doesn't matter, and it doesn't go well, then there's no reason to be angry.