take the bus to campus,
meet a visiting colleague,
discuss math over a cup of coffee.
i try not to live under too many illusions, but so far this has gone well enough. whether it is truly a productive use of time, it has at least felt productive. in contrast, on most days of the week i feel as if i've accomplished absolutely nothing.
maybe we have discussed rather trivial things.
maybe this will lead to a new project.
who knows?
we'll work and we'll see;
that's all we can do, anyway.
that colleague leaves this weekend. i'll probably see him again in may.
so this morning i woke up without an agenda or much motivation. i couldn't decide what to work on.
in the end, i grew tired of standing indecisively in my living room. i packed a heavy backpack (as to be ready for any sort of math), went out, and bought a cup of coffee.
it seemed to help. i soon went to work on a long-neglected research problem, one i had set aside some months ago. it wasn't wholly unproductive.
[1] i teach on wednesday mornings. by thursday, we reached an interesting point in the discussion, so on friday morning, i decided to sacrifice an hour or two of sleep in favor of strong coffee and maths.
2 comments:
Have you ever noticed that the roots of the characteristic polynomial of skew-symmetric matrices all have real part equal to 0? It's usually stated that they are pure imaginary. I like saying it the other way I think it's interesting. Don't lose too much sleep. You'll become delirious.
i think i tend to lose sleep, regardless of that.
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