if i said that i was completely unproductive today, then that would be a lie. it would be true, however, that i was wholly unproductive while in the office.
so many mathematical things to do,
and i did none of them, today.
..
then again, that's not quite true .. not in spirit, anyway. i did teach today, though i think it went poorly. last night i got excited about this one "application" of stoke's the0rem [1] that i realised that i could explain.
put in layman's terms,
"the surface integral of the curl of "any" 3-dimensional vector field, over a 2-sphere, is zero." [2]
after i finished those few minutes of explanation, i noted that my students' eyes were more glazed than usual. oh well.
at any rate, i did do some sort of labor today. as for research, i did read a 3-page research note from 2003. from it, i learned something:
the more i think about it,
the less i really know about d0ub1ing measures.
[1] isn't it strange how badly math jargon translates, to non-mathematicians? for example, when someone in pure maths refers to an application, (s)he's probably not talking about physics or chemistry or anything related to the world.
similarly, when i say that i will estimate a certain quantity, i don't mean that i will give you a decimal number of a quantity that can actually be measured physically.
[2] i.e. sufficiently smooth vector fields in R3. sadly, to most calculus students, every function has a derivative.
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