I’ve recently gotten my hands on a couple of research papers that answer a couple of outstanding questions in one of my own projects. They answer them so well, in fact, that I’m not sure how much there is to say about our stuff. This is something of a shame, since I’m supposed to be speaking about it in less than 20 hours, but I suppose better now than later, right? Aside from which, saying “here’s a handful of results that we’re now going to apply in a completely different area of mathematics” should be worth something.
Aside from their content, the papers — or one of them, at least — hae also resolved for me another mystery: namely, exactly why it is that my old advisor uses the notation that he does. Whenever there’s a call to create notation, you can usually count on my advisor to come up with something that’s complex but complete: it covers all the bases, even if it does so in a somewhat impenetrable manner. Well, he was trained as an analyst, and from the looks of it that style of notation isn’t uncommon in analysis. So in some ways trying to read one of these papers was a little like coming home, if we add the proviso that “home” is a dark and strange place where you can’t find anything.
In other news, another term has ended, hurrah hurrah. Exams next week, then a few weeks of road-tripping to conferences and the like, and then something else happens. All the while, of course, I’ll be working on writing and editting drafts of papers, and playing around with some new ideas, and maybe even updating more frequently. I’ve noticed that I’ve got four or five draft posts lying around that I started and then got distracted from, or couldn’t find the words I was looking for, or something; maybe next week in between grading, writing, and dealing with panicked students I’ll polish them up and share them with you all.