A mathematician talking about math? What a concept. Except it’s not really about math, so don’t stop reading just because it says “mathblogging” up there at the top of the post.
So I was at a conference last week, as I noted elsewhere. (If that’s an unfollowed link for you, then here’s the summary: I apparantly won the combinatorial equivalent of Rookie of the Year. Go me!) One of the many things that conferences are good for is that they tend to spark new projects; sometimes that means agreeing in principle that sometime several months from now one is going to start thinking about a thing, and sometimes it means that a puzzle invades one’s brain and starts sending out for pizza and beer, and won’t leave until it’s been resolved one way or another.
I’ve been working on one of the latter problems, a pretty little question about cycle decompositions of certain circulant graphs that was proposed by Codename Triple-M. I don’t usually reason analogically in graph theory — that is, I seem to think in the concepts themselves rather than metaphors for the concepts — but I find myself thinking about this particular question in terms of coloured yarn for some reason, and so have been phrasing ideas to myelf in terms of tying off ends, straight vs. twisted strands, etc.
I typed up a bunch of the ideas & sent them along to Triple-M earlier, and now there’s a supremely unreasonable part of my mind that’s muttering things like “what, no response yet?” and wondering who’s going to clean up all the beer cans and pizza boxes littering the floor of my brain.