now: cards on the table.

two weeks ago, i thought about those people who have multiple jοb offers, and these were thoughts of disdain:

come on, guys: share the wealth!
some of us need jοbs too!

shortly afterwards, i became one of those people. these are not easy decisions, i realize this now. after ten days of thinking about it, i met the deadline and i made a decision.

i know several people who haven't heard anything and it's a guilty feeling to have more than what you need. it's kin to being on fellowship when other people have to teach, or having a paper accepted when others are just trying to come up with ideas.

so it's time for other people to have a chance. i've made my peace and it will last three years, and i think i'll be happy about it. sure, i might kick myself if a fantastic school asks me if i'm interested in their Nth round of offers, but that's something i can tolerate.

i can live with a little what-if, because i think i'll be happy with what i have. i guess that's all that matters, in the end.

(as always, ask if you want to know where i decided to go.)

---

what i didn't expect was how hard it was to refuse an offer. almost all of the departments which were receptive to me were probably so because i knew someone in the department who was arguing on my behalf.

turning down those offers was like turning down that colleague, who in most cases is a good acquaintance, even a friend.

i read an article once which claimed that on average, it is much harder to fire someone than to be fired. i think i can appreciate that, and sympathise.

but it's over now. i feel a little like the last scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, where uma thurman is lying on the bathroom floor, emotionally in pieces.

(yes, that analogy again.)

an appetizer is now on the menu.

now it's a matter of good taste and arranging the best meal..
.. well, that and writing a thesis, of course!

the future is near.

last week i received good news.

i won't be starving next year. it's now a matter of choosing from the menu. in fact, i'm trying to figure out if i can have an appetizer first.

is anyone still following this analogy?
(as usual, write me if you really want to know.)

so i'll be moving away by summer's end. it still seems somewhat unreal. heck, defending in may still seems like an abstract concept.

the only thing which makes sense is starting something new.

a new mathematics project,
new collaborations,
learning new things.

i think having spent 6 months thinking deeply, really fleshing out a thesis, writing and rewriting and revising: all of that has been good for me. it's taught me discipline ..

.. not that i've ever shown any ..

but it's good to know what it is, and to understand how much work it takes to create something.

mathematics isn't just thinking every day at the cafe, drawing diagrams and trying to come up with something interesting, something cool.

that's only a part of it, the beginning.

the really cool things are those which catch your eye, early on, and which somehow survive the long haul.

it's all the more surprising when you think about how many cool ideas there are in the world.

there are things i want to figure out, and i want the time to try and figure them out. i'm curious and ambitious and don't know any better than to try.

a preprint brings unexpected memories.

today my mind was scattered and i couldn't concentrate on very much, which is a dangerous state to be in. my days are numbered and there is still quite a bit of a thesis to write.

as always, i worry.

but i didn't mean to cast this post in such a negative light. i meant to write about a new preprint on the SNS Pisa preprint server called

"The Bernstein Problem in Higher Dimensions"
Authors: Umberto Massari - Mario Miranda - Michele Miranda Jr

[the link]

i find it a bit unusual, in two respects:

1. Abstract: In this work we have reconsidered the famous paper of Bombieri, De Giorgi and Giusti and, thanks to the software Mathematica we made it possible for anybody to control the difficult computations.
   
   interesting. i guess it's a good thing, to include something interactive in the paper. myself, i've used mathematica before for symbolic computation: it involved checking the ricci curvature of a certain manifold.
   
   
2. the introduction is a little story, a narrative. reading it reminded me of the advisor and the december memorial service. i, too, felt like i stood in the shadows; when it was over, a small band of us spirited away and talked a little math.
   
   i think the advisor would have approved. (:
   

mishap.

argh. argggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

i am an idiot,
a stubborn idiot.

this is the second time in a row that i've missed an important telephone call

1. because i wasn't in the office,
   
2. because my cell phone was on silent-mode.
   

i blame the american red cross. i blame them and environment: michigan.

they are good causes, but they will NOT stop calling me.

i even gave blood two weeks ago and still the red cross calls me yesterday, reminding me about the "Big Ten Blood Battle" and about how important it is to give blood anyway.

besides, who gives blood just so that their school can beat a rival school?!?!?!?

today environment: michigan calls me twice and the second time i told them in no uncertain terms to get me off their telephone list.

spam me, fine: just don't call me when i'm working. i was angry enough to set my cell phone to silent mode and bury it in my backpack ..

.. and later, when i heard a buzzing noise, i looked at caller ("Unknown / no number available") and seething, reburied it. those d@mned do-gooder telemarketers, i thought, while debating the merits of which metric to choose.

an hour ago, i remembered my phone (to charge it) and realised: wait. that area code looks familiar ..

oh. um: cr@p.
of all the calls, i missed his call?!?

i'll have to call them back tomorrow.
it's good news, but ..

..why does this have to happen to me?
from now on, my phone will never be on silent-mode!

(for once, something relevant to thesis-writing.)

i digress in conversations. a lot.
especially when i'm not in a hurry.

that said, i wonder if i am writing too many "Remarks" in this thesis.

i'm not crazy .. am i?

is it a sign of mathematical obsessive-compulsive disorder if,

    while walking from your office to the water fountain,
    that you prefer to take a non-nullhomotopic route?

i mean, it's not as if you're avoiding tile and sidewalk cracks, right? this is a matter of preference .. (:

.. anyways, back to thesis-writing.

terminology.

after reading this wiki, i still can't tell when to say that a given fact is a proposition or a theorem.

oh well.

as long as the proof is correct,
a rose by any other name .. (:

update on the job search.

not much to say: this morning i received another "no, thank you."

oh well.
had they hired me, i wouldn't have had anyone there to work with, anyway.

---

EDIT (1:20PM) make that two "no"s:

i wouldn't have been right for that tenure-track job, anyway.

sooner or later i'll either run out of excuses,
or they will become painfully repetitive ..

i never learn, do i?

i stayed up late last night and at the end of my travails, i wrote this.

there's no point in doing mathematics when it's too late at night -- at least, not for me. by the time i set down my pen and paper, either of two things happen:

1. i'm no longer awake or sharp enough to prove anything rigorously, no matter how much i really want to prove something;
   
   
2. i think i've proven something, but the late hour makes me sloppy. experience tells me that when morning comes, i'll find a mistake and then curse my idiocy.
   

at the time i wrote those words, it was 3:52am.
i think i'm obsessing again.

on the other hand, this morning [1] i looked through my work again and it's not all paper to be recycled. i did make an implicit hypothesis and only did a special case last night, so the work remains technically correct.

it looks promising, but when i think about it, the setting is somewhat specific and the tools i have in mind don't address those specifics.

so my suspicions remain: the tools don't seem to be strong or sophisticated enough to prove what i want to prove. i think i'm wrong in some way ..

after all, i am always wrong in some way..

but i don't yet know which way. this reminds me of a passage that descartes writes in his discourse on method:

I cannot help deriving extreme satisfaction from the progress which I think I have already made in my research into the truth and in conceiving such hopes for the future that, if among the occupations of men, simply as men, there is one which is surely good and important, I venture to think it's the one I have chosen.

However, it could be the case that I am wrong and that perhaps what I have taken for gold and diamonds is only a little copper and glass. I know how much we are subject to making mistakes in what touches ourselves and also how much we should beware of the judgments of our friends when they favour us.

anyways, time's up: that's enough for "new math." i should get back to writing up my dissertation again ..

.. otherwise i will never finish it .. \:

[1] technically, it was still morning: i woke at 11:15am or so, though i felt rotten.

the futility of it all.

i have this suspicion that my thesis is trivial or more accurately, that it might be redundant.

i've said before that if three [1] particular mathematicians sat down to dinner, one night in 2000, they could have surmised what i proved over the last year.

i'm sure of it now.

in fact, the coincidence could have been more likely. you would have needed only two particular mathematicians, and a coffee session would have been long enough.

sometimes i don't know why i bother with mathematics.

other people can do research more effectively and with more elegant ideas than mine. my ideas feel clumsy and i feel foolish and slow and unpurposeful.

i don't know why i try, anymore. maybe i should look for something else to do.

[1] maybe five. it depends on how you make the count, which is tricky. i once thought you needed seven.

a new webpage design.

the undergraduate mentor once told me that my webpage is "a work of art." to say the least, i was flattered.

at any rate, i've changed my mathematics homepage. the old version seemed dark, and in some effort to turn my life around from several recent dark turns, i thought to have a brighter, simpler design.

it now looks like this.

it seems fine on my current version of mozilla firefox. the next time i'm on a mac, i'll see how it looks on safari.

jοbs and rumοrs (or, the wιki)

when i was applying for jοbs, i would check the AMS jοbs website and mathj0bs several times a day.

i still look in, every day or every other day. every so often, a new jοb appears.

the new obsession, of course, is the the math jοbs rumοr mill (wikι).

firstly, congratulations to all my friends who are listed there, at some stage of success or another. i hope you get your offers, if they have not yet been decided.

with that said, i'll move on to a soliloquy.

---

i don't know how i feel about it, but i can say that it's informative.

by this i mean that if you see that one particular school has made its offers and you haven't gotten one, then .. drat, oh well. at least i know now, for certain [1], and can plan accordingly.

it is also convenient to know whom to blame if you don't get an offer, that is, who did an offer when you didn't, etc.

of course, this is all from the perspective of the unlucky ones.

to have posted or updated that one has received an offer or shortlist: i realise that it's not being boastful.

it's simply information, plain and true [1], and the more information there is, the more effectively other people can adjust their own plans.

on the other hand, if i were given an offer then i don't know if i would be comfortable putting my name out there. perhaps there is already an option to indicate that yes, a school has made offers already; if you haven't gotten one, sorry.

that's enough information to benefit the public and without exposing your hand, right? after all, if people really want to know who has gotten which offer, then i'm sure that they could find out somehow.

[1] that is, if you trust the rumors. i suspect the most of the updates are made by the same candidates who have been given offers or shortlisted, and are trustworthy data.

defeat, for now.

i spent most of today depressed and hating myself, and it was all because i couldn't prove a theorem ..

.. rather, a claim that i want to be a theorem.

of the last three people to whom i told my ideas, two of them said to focus on the 2-dimensional case first.

but now it's done; it will go into my thesis.
now there's only one big N-dimensional enchilada (for N > 2).

i've thought about it in all sorts of ways .. but obviously not too many, because i don't have a theorem or a counterexample.

nothing is working.

the most frustrating thing is that i get ideas all the time. none of them have worked.

if i think i have a proof, it usually takes six hours before i find the flaw, and a few more hours before i give up trying to find a patch.

you know what?

i have another idea. i'm not sure it will work, but if it doesn't then i still want to know why.

but there's not much time. i need more sophisticated machinery and it will take days to work with it, probably a week or two in order to understand how it really works ..

.. and that's before i try out my idea.

---

i'm running out of time.

there are still thesis chapters to write and revisions of chapters already written.

argh.   arggggggggggghhhhhhhh.

sometimes i wonder if this is all going to fall apart. i wouldn't be surprised if it does.