just when you think the writing is done .. dilemma.

by my estimate, i have two subsections to write, then a full-scale edit, and then i will have a preprint. let's hope it will be ready for the AMS secti0nal in october ..

.. that is, if anyone bothers to come to my talk and even then, if they bother to ask about my work.

inevitably i'm always scheduled against a more popular figure in a parallel session and the masses goes to his (or her) talk. a few colleague-friends stick around sometimes, if only to be nice.

you'd think that, upon seeing the finish line to be so near, this would be cause for comfort. then again .. come on.

if you've been reading this blog for a while, then you'd know:
there is never any cause for comfort or joy. q:

on friday i vowed to leave the grading in the office ..
(which, oddly enough, was a vow that i actually kept)

.. and worked on writing. when i tired of writing, i thought about where these ideas were going, what i want to prove next. that usually means a game of "let's pretend we know a lot and see what happens" and degenerates into depression, once the game stops and reality sets in.

then again, what's life without a little risk?

so i've started a new batch of research notes -- a kind of mathematical diary, if you will -- pertaining to this one c0njecture that i've been obsessing about. some months ago i told my mathematical sibs about an idea of mine which is related to other things. at the time it convinced them, but oddly enough, not me ..

.. partly because they didn't check the details and thereby failed to realise what might go wrong.

i don't blame them; i'm loathe to check the details of the ideas of others, too, mostly because i'm lazy. if i were left unchecked and i thought harder and past their ideas, it would also feel like stealing.

now it seems like the idea works. so what's the rub? my soon-to-be-preprint is supposed to be a special case of the conjecture.

i've proven all these lemmata just so the machinery runs the way that i want it to, in that one little case.

there would be similar machinery involved if this newish idea works -- similar, but sufficiently different that the proofs i've written already would require small but consistent modifications ..

.. and probably 2 more pages of some generalities. argh.

so, the dilemma: if i don't do some rewriting, then i have to reprove little tweaks of everything in the next paper as well as the newer machinery i need to run the newish idea.

i'm bleeding pages, already;
29 pages and counting, for the current writeup.

on the other hand, this is assuming that the idea really does work, and that i'm not having delusions of grandeur again. so unless i'm absolutely sure, why risk changing something that's perfectly fine?

..

i hate to say this, but sometimes i wish i could ask my late advisor for .. well, advice. i wished i asked him more often, when he was still alive.

i have learned a lesson today about writing exams. unless you really mean to, never ask your students to graph anything. it amounts to grading artwork on lesser merits.

[sighs]

on the plus side, apparently the exam i wrote wasn't up to my usual standards of diffculty; for my 40-point test, there were quite a few marks in the mid-30s.

either i'm getting soft, or the students here know how to compute (as opposed to the TI-8? clutching masses that i remember at the U of M).

in fact, there is a no-calculator policy for exams. huzzah!!!!
(you have no idea how happy i was to hear about that.)

at any rate, let's hope that the students don't get too cocky. i don't mind if they don't listen to me in class (as long as they're quiet), but next comes optimizations, lagrange multipliers, and everything that comes with integration. the last thing i need is to settle an unexpected panic on a second midterm.

until then -- a load of grading off my shoulders. teaching-wise, it's smooth sailing until mid- to late october.

one month in, and what has happened.

there's nothing like usurping a departmental computer when nobody's around, and using it for your own personal ends ..

.. such as blogging.

i miss blogging, even though i probably do as much of it as i used to. if i had to gauge now vs. before, then it seems that these entries are more urgent and repetitive. i feel like i keep on reiterating the same goals and fail to meet them, week after week.

now that i think about it, it's a month into my postdoc. so far,

• no new directions of research taken; i've thought about similar problems which are related to my thesis, but nothing serious. rather: i've proven nothing too interesting, but i want to reach something interesting. this may sound over-confident, but i think i can. [1]
  
  
• no papers finished. in email correspondence i've assured friends, who are venturing into the market, that they are better prepared now than i was, then: i was a man without preprints, only a research statement, and for some reason, someone still wanted to hire me.
  
  funny world, that.
  
  i suppose it is good that i can soothe the anxieties of friends, but it also works the other way: ye gods, everyone seems to have papers and preprints. i have a job now, but in three years ..?
  
  
• i've fallen ill and only now do i feel normal again.
  
  
• .. and yes, there is something positive on this list. i'm slowly getting to know my research group, visitors included. today i met a finnish analyst whom i've only before known by hearsay. it is nice to know that he exists and seems a friendly fellow.
  
  
• related to that, i'm slowly feeling like less of a visitor and part of this faculty.
  
  just today i was invited to sit through a pre-dissertation meeting for a newly-made candidate. it was interesting work and i could even understand some of it. for the experts, it was a mixture of su6riemannian 9e0metry and ma$$ tran$p0rtati0n problems: good stuff.
  
  

every weekend i hope for a productive weekend. sometimes it happens; other times i can only say that i visited the library.


[1] this could also be my one-track mind: i've not even one paper about my thesis work ready, yet. in my own mind it feels like i shouldn't work on anything too new until at least that paper is done. it tests my patience, of course ..

.. but one works faster when one has something to do and would rather do something else.

busy, busy, busy: no time for goals.

a few days ago i learned that TAs here are not expected to help grade midterm exams. so that leaves me with 150+ calculus 3 exams to grade. i'm 1/4 done already, but that's because i graded the vector operations problem first.

the rest will be gory;
i have a bad feeling about this.

today is also part 2 of an expository talk that i promised to give. that won't be so bad, though: i've given it before and it's mostly fun and picture driven, with many happy colors.

---

i just wish that at some point, i can get back to writing. odds are that once i get to writing, i'll start complaining about how annoying that process is ..

.. but for now, the grass is truly greener in terms of motivation. if i finish grading these exams, then it only means that upon returning them to students, the complaints will start. if i finish a draft, then at least it's next a gamble to see if it can be accepted into print, by some journal.

it would nice to flesh out new research as well. (ye gods, the backlog is growing.)

a forecast of an AMS meeting; (future) thoughts about writing

i just checked the schedules for the AM$ Se¢tional Meeting at Midd1et0wn, CT for october. indeed, i was told before that pekk@ k0ske1a will be giving an invited address, but apparently there are 2, even 3, special sessions that will be of particular interest to me.

"analysis on metric measure spaces and on fractals" - it seems that there is much excitement about analysis on laaks0 spaces and on $ierpinski ¢arpets, at least in the research centers of c0rnell and uc0nn. i know these spaces, but nothing about their analysis, so it will be good to learn some.

i wonder if they will be disappointed if i tell them of we@ver's example: there exist no nontrivial derivati0ns on the standard $ierpinski ¢arpet. \:

"geometric function theory and geometry" - this seems to be a mi¢higan hyperbolic geometry sub-conference in disguise. i recognise at least half the names of the speakers: some whom i've met, and some from hearsay, including the m@th j0bs wik!.

L: if you're reading this, i'm counting "qua$iregu1ar" as a hyperb01ic word. q:

"geometric group theory and topology" - i'm less familiar with this kind of thing. however, ome talks will discuss this "1amp1ighter gr0up" that i've heard about, in the work of na0r and collaborators. maybe i'll go just to learn more about it ..

.. then again, i remember once attending a talk because the title included the term "kahler manifold" and i wanted to know what such a manifold was. i went to the talk and listened, and the speaker never defined what it was.

so perhaps, in light of 20-minute presentations, i shouldn't hope for too much. maybe it's better that i stick to what i think i know.

at any rate, there will be many interesting talks.

the last time this happened, very few people attended my talk. maybe the same will happen again, but that could be good. if i give a bad talk, at least nobody would be there to listen to it.

---

as for other matters, my students have an exam on wednesday, and i think my lectures have scared them enough that they are worried. this, of course, means more emails than i'd rather deal with.

speaking of which, i have a review class to prepare for tomorrow. i hate review classes: either nobody has any questions or there are floods of questions because the students are panicking. besides, as long as the student goes over notes and the textbook and the homework and the department sanctioned practice problems, what is there to worry about?

it's not like this is a qual or a prelim or something, least of all a thesis defense. q:

on top of that, part 2 of my expository talk is thursday. it's going to be the fun, picture-drawing part, but it will take its own share of preparation.

on the plus side, i finished most the introduction to a draft of a paper today; what remains is the part about "notation and terminology" and the last section. i've begun to plan for the future already: what the next paper will contain ..

.. assuming, of course, that the details work out.

i've been running into the problem, lately, that i don't have anything interesting enough to make more papers. i mean: it would be nice if i could prove this or that, which would round out the discussion nicely, but can i prove those things?

most of the time: no. that leaves this little auxiliary, good-for-nothing lemmas -- the very results i could prove because i avoid the hard bits. you can't (or rather, shouldn't) make papers of those things.

then again, publish or perish. we'll see how long my principles last. \:

cutting my losses (unhappily)

i've too many things on my plate and not enough time, so i think i'll apply for the NSF resear¢h grants next year and not this year.

maybe it was the time i lost at the hospital, but more likely it was how i used up my summertime. if i had spent the month of august 2008 at pittsburgh, i might have spent more time working on a good application and have been ready by now.

might have,
could have,
should have:

these are silly words. we do or we don't: those should be the only words that matter.

so instead i suppose i should really get down to writing papers and furthering my fledgling research. after all, you can't write a good application if you don't have anything to put on it.

there's that, and i have to prepare an exam to my calculus students, this coming wednesday. somehow i have a very bad feeling about this.

---

so yes: another year and i'm bowing out of the competition. last year it was the NSF postd0ctoral fe11owships; it was bad timing and i wouldn't have known who my mentor/supervisor would be.

still, it irks me. maybe i'll just remember how indignant i feel, and maybe i'll finally do it right, next year. everyone needs his motivations, so maybe i'll just hate myself for a while.

priorities.

i was discharged this morning and i made it to cover my office hour today. after helping out my students, this occurred to me:

i don't do as much listening as i used to do. the student would say something, try to ask the right question to express his confusion, and all i could think was how do i explain that it's this way?

maybe this is a sign of efficiency. if i listened closely to all of my students, then i would be a commendable teacher, but i would also have no time for anything else.

it still bothers me;
then again, so do my unwritten articles and grant proposals and talks. \-:

still stuck.

sometimes life is unfair.

i'm stuck in this hospital with no ssh, no sftp, and no LaTeX, but emails from students just keep on coming ..

[sighs]

also: it's hard to think about maths while in hospital rooms. there are many machines around and a lot of beeping. on the plus side, i'm glad that i brought a ton of scratch paper.

in which i am an invalid, and technologically trapped.

it's been about 48 hours since i last saw my laptop. it's not missing because i know where it is: on my office desk, charging. i can't remember whether it's on or not.

if i had my laptop, i'd have blogged sooner, i'd have popped open a LaTeX GUI program and worked on my draft of a research article. i'd have uploaded a review sheet to my students so that they could better study for next week's exam.

but no: i'm stuck in a d@mned h0spital.

i've been here since monday afternoon, and fool that i am, owning an a$us eee p¢ which is very easy to carry around, and i leave it in the office.

admittedly, i thought i'd just see a doctor, get a prescription, and make it back to my office hour. it's not dangerous and not life-threatening and i'm doing well, but it was more serious than i thought. maybe they will let me out by tomorrow afternoon ..

.. but part two of my seminar talk for tomorrow has been preemptively canceled. one less worry, i guess, but i was looking forward to preparing it after my treatments today.

what's good is that this hospital has a library for patients and their visitors, and in this library they have computers which connect to the internet.

the lobbies all have wifi, too. it used to be tempting; now it is taunting.

---

it's easy to feel useless. i just didn't realise how much i depended on my personalised computer, with sftp and ssh and LaTeX and so on.

on the plus side, i started an introduction for the paper draft. it's written in longhand, in bits and pieces and revisions, and after today it might be ready for LaTeX.

i suppose that's something. without the right tools, it's a bit challenging to be productive.

i think they mean statisticians, not mathematicians.

i ran into the following article after a friend of mine posted it on facebook. apparently it's called "Mathematicians are new masters of the universe."

an excerpt:

These IBM spies are members of a new breed of mathematical whiz kids who are collecting data on almost everything we do and using it to get us to work harder, spend more, vote for a particular candidate, and even choose a particular partner.

They are the subject of "The Numerati" (Houghton Mifflin, $26), a book by BusinessWeek writer Stephen Baker.

In the 20th century, industrial companies used stopwatches and clipboards to measure productivity. In the post-industrial age, companies need only monitor our computer keystrokes to turn office workers into what Baker calls "data serfs."

it sounds like statistics to me.

maybe the writer is referring to applied mathematicians, which would fit. as for opinions about this sort of thing -- data mining, i mean -- for now i have none.

maybe i should be more specific and start calling myself a theorist. heck, i'd settle for being called a teacher because among other things, that's who i am ..

otherwise people might think that i'm one of these people, looking over their shoulder or their web bookmarks. \:

(ethni¢) c0mmunicati0n breakd0wn.

today is one of those days when i really, really, really wish that i could ¢ommunicate in mandarin.

just earlier, one prof walked up and just started speaking. it was hard to find the most tactful moment to tell him that no, i couldn't understand him.

[sighs]

sometimes it is a burden, being born and raised as an american.

---

on the plus side, the prof still wants to talk math, at some point. i also find it surprising, because he attended my talk yesterday.

if i had gone to my own talk and listened, i wonder if i (the audience member) would bother talking to me (the speaker). \:

the talk: after-math

well, part one of the talk is over. i think i essentially confused the audience, or bored them: whichever comes more naturally. thinking back on it, i tried to do too much in one session.

however, it is helpful to have experts in the audience.

hopefully part two will go more smoothly. there are more gory details, but the setting is much more concrete.

a visit to the library; talk paranoia continues.

i meant to post this earlier, but there is something very wonderful about having the mathematics library two floors down from my office. i don't know exactly how many times, while in ann arbor, i thought about checking out a mathematics book from the library and decided that it wasn't worth the walk.

of course, it would help if my university ID were working and the librarian didn't have to swipe my card through the reader, again and again and again, to no avail. in the end she manually checked my books out -- that is, wrote down the library of congress numbers, book titles, authors of the books on a special form, and then gave me the books.

at first i didn't realise that this was possible, until it occurred to me how they must have done transactions in the days before barcode scanners. i've lived with these fine electronic devices all my life, you see; i've never seen anyone check out a book "manually."

it made me feel like a suspicious person, like a visiting scholar instead of a postdoc. i've been getting that feeling lately, but not as often anymore; i think this means that i'm wearing out my welcome.

oh well. at least i have the books.

---

i've been getting paranoid about how little background i have about the topic i'm presenting tomorrow, in a talk. having checked out these books by väisä1ä and by ah1f0rs, i learned several things.

1. either it's been too long and i've forgotten, or that i never learned these things properly, but these books are really good;
   
   
2. i wasn't paranoid; i was right. i do have a paltry background and am the wrong person to give this talk.
   

since it's too late to cancel, i guess i have to build a talk from the notes i've jotted down from the last few days. there's still the challenge of giving a talk that is both (partly) accessible to students yet interesting enough to experts.

i've seen so many talks that were successful in this dual approach. it makes me wonder, now, how they do it.

a (work) holiday in spain ..

it seems like spain is the place to be, next summer,
and specifically: barcelona.

i wonder if i can convince anyone to pay for my trip.

---

anyways, either back to work or off to sleep;
i haven't decided yet.

a non-teaching day (i.e. now i have time to worry about a talk)

you know, at first i thought that this talk would be much the same as one i've given before. then i thought about my audience of yesteryear and my audience to come, and now i've realised something.

our analysis group is a coalition of 7+ profs and spans many different areas, among them

several complex variables,
banach space theory,
harmonic analysis,
analysis on metric spaces,
and analysis of differential equations (both ordinary and partial).

in short, i'm no longer in "the qua$i-w0r1d."

worse yet, now i'm supposed to be an "expert" on quasic0nforma1 mappings. of all people .. me?!?

i suppose it's the usual stereotype: if you're an analyst from the U of M and trained under so-and-so, then "you must be an expert on this-and-that." i know that nobody expects me to be as capable as my advisor, but ..

.. this should be interesting.

oh well: if i am really, truly a mathematical fake, then at least my colleagues should know earlier than later. q;

---

on the plus side: browsing through this paper again, i've forgotten how cool it is.

i've forgotten how wonderful it is to work in euclidean space and use old, familiar friends like the Riem@nn Mappin9 Theorem or harm0nic mea$ure or linear transf0rmations of space.

reading these proofs, you get the feeling of cleverness, from someone who is classically trained and knows the right tools for the job.

of course, i say this because today is tuesday, and i don't have class to teach. there are still many things to juggle:

there's the usual research and writing, of course.

at some point i should attempt a grant proposal. in the same spirit, our research group has to do its part to secure funding for the department. so i'm to give a brief description of my research.

there are travel plans (read: headaches) to make for an october conference. in my mind i want to have a readable draft of a paper by then, and talk about the results. why do i get the feeling that i won't make it?

[sighs]

well, the work piles up. i'd better get to it.

the usual complaints.

i've lately had this suspicion that i'm doing something .. not wrong, but inefficiently. all my time seems to be slipping away, and my research-related to-do list grows by the day. perhaps it used to be funny, but not anymore.

---

students flooded my office hour today. their homework is due tomorrow and wednesday. i find that to be a bad omen.

i would keep ranting about teaching, but it's getting old and i don't want to think about it until tomorrow afternoon. suffice to say that it's draining -- the lectures, the email, the students and the requests. sometimes it's not even an issue of time, but of the mental space it takes up.

maybe i should stop worrying. a friend of mine once argued that when the teacher doesn't teach so well, the students will work a little harder. i wonder if i should try that out.

argh: just now, another email. sometimes i hate myself. i told the student to email me, otherwise i'd forget. now i can't.

---

if i counted right, it was 45 minutes. today i thought about new research for a total of 45 minutes, before succumbing to hunger and buying/eating a small chickpea curry with rice from one of the campus food trucks.

i know some of you will say: "45 minutes? Ha! I haven't had time to do research in weeks!" so, sorry: it still bothers me and i want to be productive. if i had larger blocks of time, i'd be writing in efforts to finish up a draft of that Paper Which Refuses To Be Finished (and Which Once Took The Form of a Thesis).

others of you will say: "Janus, you are doing something wrong. If you don't have time for research, then you are spending too much time on other things." i wonder about that, a lot .. or maybe as often as i have time to worry about such matters.

most of tomorrow is wide open. apart from exercise and one appointment with a student, i have the day to scholarly pursuits ..

.. like writing that talk that i'm supposed to give on thursday. oh well. it's a worthwhile endeavor. at some point i have to squeeze in time for research and writing and, as a new challenge ..

.. applying for a grant.

TGIF

the one friday that i miss colloquium becomes the friday night in which i'm attending dinner with the colloquium speaker.

argh.

he seems nice, though .. even offered to show me his slides at some point, next week.

---

as for why i missed it, i was running around, doing teaching errands of questionable importance. after 1 1/2 weeks into the semester, i think i have a newfound respect for administrators and people who interact with people for a living.

i also have a newfound wariness of scale: both my lectures are larger in population than how i've taught before. one has around 80 students.

emails alone are bothersome enough. they come every day. i used to have this rule of "no email or internet before noon" in efforts to get more research done, but i wonder how well i can stick to it ..

.. especially as the semester moves forward. in a few weeks, i'm suppose to have written and administered my first midterm.

ye gods: how does anyone get any research done?

---

at some point i'd like to blog about research-related ideas again. in the meanwhile, dear reader(s), i suppose you have to settle for my gripes about teaching.

the less0n p1an that i can't seem to write.

one thing is going to bother me about teaching tomorrow.

we're covering the curvature of vector-valued functions r(t) and their associated curves, and there is a formula for curvature k(t) only in terms of the first and second derivatives r'(t) and r"(t), respectively.

it's a useful formula. you'd otherwise be stuck computing the unit tangent vector and its derivative (w.r.t. the parameter t) which would involve the length of the tangent vector and messy square roots.

the proof -- a clever computation -- isn't terribly intuitive but makes sense, once you make an observation or two. so i'm going to skip it; there's too much to cover, anyway.

however, i hate giving out formulas without explaining them: if you understand why a formula is true, then you're more likely to remember it correctly and less likely to make mistakes with it.

the converse isn't necessarily true, of course.

however, i'd rather not turn my calculus course into a "memorize and use these formulas" sort of course. there is that bias already in mathematics, just as how history is "just names and dates."

the trouble is, i can't find an intuitive way to explain this formula, other than the proof. at some point i should decide something .. and this lesson plan is taking longer than i'd like: there's still some research that i want to do, tonight, and of course ..

.. NSF grant proposals are in a month.
arghhhhhh. i hate myself already.

so i was right and it's official. i'm slated to talk next week. the odd bit, though, is that i gave this same (or similar) talk 3 1/2 years ago ..

.. as you can guess, it will be an expository talk. somehow i get the feeling that i'll be talking quite often, this term. \:

the lessons a teacher learns.

i've learned my own lessons through the practice of teaching.

1. as a general principle, i think it's healthy for students to be slightly nervous about the course. it's not that i like scaring my students ..
   
   .. well, admittedly i do,
   but that's not the point q: ..
   
   .. but a healthy dose of fear/nerves is natural when encountering something new. for example, think of the nervousness before a race or a sports match.
   
   however, i have learned that maybe, just maybe, it's possibly to scare your students too much.
   
   
2. as a lesson to new teachers: don't ever say that you take office hours by appointment unless either you really mean it ..
   
   .. or you are impressively good at being brusque and unapproachable without being rude or mean.
   

as you can imagine, i'm holding a few appointments this week.

maybe i should relent a little more on the students ..

on seminar lists.

at U of M, the weekly list of seminars is comparable to the list of mathematics courses available in small departments elsewhere. i used to attend ..

[counts]

.. anywhere from 4 to 9 on any given week (including colloquium). the pitt schedule is nowhere as grandiose, but i saw the schedule this week and thought these topics interesting. in fact, i didn't expect them to be classified as "t0p0109y."

Sept 2nd, Tuesday 2pm - T0P0L09Y SEMINAR
"wi1d em6eddin9gs of ¢ant0r sets in R³"

Sept 2nd, Friday 3pm - T0P0L09Y SEMINAR
"The Rec09niti0n pr0b1em for t0p0109i¢a1 manif01ds"

apparently there is a visiting scholar, with something to say: something interesting, i'd say!

post-conference materials: the mathematician's boon.

i highly approve of scenarios when mathematicians take their materials from conferences and make them available online.

indeed, not everyone has money to travel (such as americans and their pitifully weak american dollars) or the time. doing so also gives a fairer chance for poorly funded mathematicians to attempt research of current interest.

think of it: if your institution cannot afford the prices of some journals, electronic access or otherwise, and if you don't have funds to travel to a conference, then how do you keep up to date with the current themes and open problems of the day?

i also have my personal reasons:

back in september of last year, my advisor was still relatively well [1] but in no real condition to travel, least of all attend a conference. so the ahlfors centennial went on without him, but nobody forgot him. his advisor (and my mathematical grandfather) 0lli marti0 had the tact and good sense to honor him at the banquet.

but i digress. i mean to write about conference materials.

the advisor was delighted to hear that there were videos and slides of the conference talks, available online. he always had a sharp ear and a good eye; in one of our last meetings, he referred me to one of prei$$'s slides and asked me if, somehow, three different conjectures in our areas of research were linked.

a week later, i told him yes [2]. on that same day, he told me that i could graduate. for next week i was supposed to send him my research statement, for job applications ..

.. but i never saw him again.

i like to think that he really enjoyed having the material at his disposal, not only because he couldn't attend. i think he liked the versatility of the interface. he could pause the talk and think for a bit. he could dwell on a slide and it wouldn't suddenly disappear.

i mean, his mind was one of the shrewdest that i've encountered, but even then .. who doesn't like instant replay and a pause button? q:

at any rate, to make a short story long, what i really meant to write is that there are now some lecture notes available on the CVGMT preprint server, sponsored by the scu0la norma1e superi0re at pi$a.

0ptimal Tran$port and ¢urv@ture: Lecture Notes (2008)

Authors: A1essi0 Figa11i - Cédri¢ Vi11ani
Abstract: These notes record the six lectures for the ¢IME Summer Course held by the second author in Cetrar0 during the week of June 23-28, 2008, with minor modifications. Their goal is to describe some recent developements in the theory of 0ptimal transp0rt, and their applications to differentia1 ge0metry.

awesome. this is exactly the direction i'd like to learn about. transportation seems to be remarkably useful and there have been some first steps towards applications in geometry. but it's such a fine thing for someone to point the way for a newbie like me, instead of resorting me to the fate of browsing this paper and that paper and figuring out which proofs are accessible and which are not.

this should be interesting!

[1] he passed away in late october. i think it was the 30th, because it was the day before hallowe'en and his family still decided to celebrate the holiday.

it bothers me that i still remember it so clearly. then again, i think i'd hate myself a little if i couldn't remember as well as i do now.

[2] if you're wondering, no: hardly any of that is written in my thesis. as the months went on, i ran out of time and energy. perhaps i'll write an article about sometime, after everything else is written ..

.. which means, of course, that i'll likely never write it down. \:

hearsay, about bana¢h $paces?

yesterday i had just started my run from my apartment towards schenley park. as i trotted past two people along the sidewalk, i distinctly heard one of them say:

"oh, it's optimal in some ell one sense."

i was this close to turning around and asking what, in fact, was optimal in the L¹ sense. in that split second, however, i decided that i'd rather be a runner than a mathematician, and so i went.

besides, L-1 might mean many things, other than the mathematical sense that i'm assuming.

so supposedly there are (other) mathematicians in my neighborhood, which makes sense. carnegie-mellon is not so far from where i live, and pitt is not much farther.

it was a lovely day in schenley park, by the way.

---

this idea (from a few days ago) still won't die, by the way. i suppose that i'm obsessing again.