cripes! foiled again. [EDITED]

argh.
it happened again .. well, sort of.

two weeks ago, i had written about how two of my ideas came too late; a trio of other researchers had similar but more elegant ideas before i did, and they can be found in this paper.

so i had made a claim about a certain class of metric 2-currents (also around two (or more) weeks ago) and thought i had a proof. it wasn't until last week that i realised that the method of proof

1. does not suit the claim;
   i never used one hypothesis.
   
   
2. is invalid, because of an immediate counter-example, and i mean, really immediate: a smooth curve in the plane, endowed with Hausdorff 1-measure, will do it.
   
   well, at least i found it before meeting the advisor;
   small favors, at least. \:

in point of fact, it was this exact claim which caused my mathematics block this morning.

it wasn't until this afternoon that i finally browsed through the latter pages of that paper. [1] in section 8d, they state a version of that claim as a proposition.

so yes, it happened again.

the frustrating part is that the result has been announced, but the paper (a different one from above) which contains the proof has not yet appeared.

so the idea remains theirs, and i am still stuck with how to prove it.

i mean, it could be worse; the claim could have been false. but it would be nice to point at something and say "that's my idea."

at the rate this is going, my thesis is going to be one big corollary. \:

EDIT (as of afternoon, 4 apr 2007): never mind. i was wrong. the proposition that i refer to does not include my case of interest. my case doesn't generalise theirs, either.

now i still don't know how to prove my claim, and what is known doesn't immediately help. so there's plenty of uncertainty left, and plenty of work to do.

[1] and of all the reasons why, it's because my postdoc friend reminded me to submit an abstract for next week's study seminar talk. in an attempt to hold myself accountable to my promises, i looked more carefully at all the sections of the paper.