after next week, i'll have given three talks this fall [0]. maybe i'll give more, but i doubt it. i'm older and wiser [1] than when i was a student. back then i'd average about 2-3 talks per term. i know better now than to push it.
then again, that doesn't mean that i'll stop everything.
recently i've been thinking about my late advisor.
two fall terms ago, he was teaching a course on ge0metric mea$ure theory and wanted to proceed to the theory on metri¢ spaces, after ambr0sio and kir¢hheim. course or not, he would still do it -- that's what he told me and others. so we began another seminar -- a secret seminar that was never listed on the U of M bulletin. we were off the radar.
on tuesdays we would meet in a lecture room and the advisor would say his piece. there were visitors sometimes, and they would give a series of guest lectures. some meetings were half-lecture, half-discussion. i learned a lot, then, about my own research.
i also realised how .. liberating it was not to present things so formally. in the U of M study seminar there evokes the same feeling, but it is nonetheless a seminar. those winter lectures felt different: informal, personal.
so i'm trying out this secret seminar thing, myself.
to two different mathematicians i've referred to this paper that i should know about -- heck, a friend of mine gave a talk about it before -- but having never read the thing, it would be pretty irresponsible of me to refer to it to others, right?
so now we are reading this paper together, and learning/relearning bits of analysis on metric spaces as we go. research-wise, i don't know where it will go; i don't need the results for any applications i have in mind, yet.
maybe some will come up; i don't know. usually i'm slow with thinking of questions, while i know of others at seminars, past and present, who start asking right away of "so from that, does it follow that ____?"
at any rate, it will be nice to revisit and to learn. sometimes i feel like i haven't escaped my thesis yet, and i'm looking to concentrate on something new for a while.
[0] this doesn't account for my tendency to ramble; when i mean "talk" this could mean a talk in two parts, each on different weeks.
[1] i mean this in the sense that, having made that many mistakes all those years ago, i'd be pretty daft if i made exactly the same ones now, wouldn't i?
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