Books!

A couple of weeks ago I was in Florida at a conference. One of the attractions of this particular conference is a certain used bookstore in town. The people who run this bookstore are well aware that every year their town is overrun by mathematicians of a certain bent, and so they make sure to be well-stocked with books that appeal to that rather limited demographic.

Oh, plus they’ll ship books around the country at ridiculously low rates. So if one already has enough stuff in their luggage, one can still buy thirty pounds of books with impunity.

My own take this year includes a couple of linguistics books, a couple of treatments of applications of discrete maths in softer subjects (social sciences, ethics), and — the prize — a three-volume comprehensive text on polyhedral combinatorics. Eighteen hundred pages of combinatorial optimization, a significant fraction of which is bibliographic information. One of my companions picked up a recent translation of Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci, which is almost too cool for words.

Between this and being lent the Firefly DVDs for the next few weeks, I can just tell that my measurable productivity is going to plummet. And I’m looking forward to it.