After multiple years of neglect, I’m rereading one of the main proofs from my dissertation. And boy, does it suck. Vertices changing names all over the place, overly torturous logic, the whole bit. Just awful. Wasn’t I supposed to have a committee to stop me from submitting crap like this?
(Well, yes. But I know for a fact that two of my four committee members didn’t read the dissertation at all, and a third read through to the end of Chapter 1; the Awful Proof in Question occurs in chapter 4.)
The reason I’m going back to it at all is that a bunch of this stuff is finally getting published soon — well, almost certainly — and the pre-referee report I’ve gotten back points out how very messy this bit is. The funny thing was that I remember being so very proud of working through the mess of cases and coming out the other side with the proof.
At least I’m sure the result’s true.
Well, mostly sure.