Elegance and science

When I think of the word elegant in a scientific context, it is usually in the sense of "The Elegant Universe", although of course I think that mathematics is way more elegant than physics will ever be :-). However, occasionally one has to consider that elegant for a human being usually means well dressed.
The only time I saw Lisa Randall, that is what impressed me most: that she is carefully
dressed in a way that most scientists (female and not) aren't. Well, that and the fact that her handwritten slides where so hard to read: I can't deal with makeup but at least my handwriting is more elegant than hers. Unfortunately I also didn't understand her talk, but that was entirely due to my lack of an appropriate background.
I don't find it bad that Tommaso Dorigo commented on her looks: she obviously gives this issue a lot of care. I did go back and read previous reports of talks by Dorigo: he never seems to refer to the looks of the speaker, male or female, but in the case of Randall he made an exception, because the looks are really striking in this case.
As Tony Smith pointed out in the comments to a later post by Dorigo, she even made an appearance on Vogue: taken in context, her statement seems actually very reasonable, and not sexist at all.
This said, I don't think that people who criticized Dorigo for including a comment on Randall's looks and her attractiveness were totally unjustified. It also seems to me no coincidence that negative remarks came both from female and minority physicists. Unfortunately there are too many physicists who do not treat men and women on equal grounds (have a long read at FSP if you have doubts about it), and therefore even reasonable people have to watch their language.
I also don't agree at all with Dorigo in the third point of his subsequent explanatory post: politely requesting pc language (not imposing it, mind you) is a reasonable thing to do. When your words are wrong, your thoughts can easily go wrong, too. In the US, eliminating the word negro from polite conversation hasn't eliminated racism. But I still view it as a progress.

Book writing

I have now started working on a project I have considered for a long time: a reference book. I'm not doing this alone, but even the little bit that I have to do myself feels like very hard work.

First of all, it is in some sense as hard as writing a research paper; many theorems are not proven in the literature, or they are proven but the proof is too technical and you start looking for easier proofs, or they are stated as "obvious" but turn out surprisingly difficult to write down in detail.

Plus, there's the difficult choice of how much to include; you cannot produce a book that no one will have time to read. In the moment we are trying to achieve a compromise, carefully labeling the material to distinguish core stuff from technical details, included only so that advanced users can find the necessary references.

Finally, you have to find meaningful examples and exercises. When you write an advanced mathematics book, it is tempting to stick to the "Definition-Lemma-Theorem-Corollary" format. But it is never a good idea. You need to give exercises, so that the reader can get hands-on experience of the new material, and examples, to connect what they have learned with what they knew before. In this particular case, it is likely that the book will be used as a reference by researchers with somewhat different backgrounds, so we need even more examples to accomodate them all.

We (here it means "me and coauthors") have decided to actually write two books: a more elementary one, which should be ready next summer, and an advanced one, to be finished in summer 2009. I do hope that we will manage, since now all the authors are either done with childbearing or not interested in it.

I am impressed by how some people either have an immense spare time or can write well fast. For instance, I am seriously considering telling my students to use The Unapologetic Mathematician as the main reference for category theory. He has written a number of beautiful, elegant posts, developing the subject in just the right degree of generality.

If I tried to do anything like that it would take me ages. And without outside help, it would never be as good. On the other hand, I am apparently the only one in my bookwriting project who is able or at least willing to take a particularly elementary approach (technically, I would call it more geometry, less algebra). So I think I should insist, however hard I find it.

Maybe I should do like See Jane Compute, and keep a sidebar with accomplished tasks. At least I would have three tasks accomplished before the deadline (namely C#1, C#2 and C#3).
I think they are unique wih this property: everything else I do, I am always late.

It's raining heavily...

maybe the end-of-the-schoolyear outdoor party of C#1 tomorrow will be canceled?

I spent some time today helping S#3 with her thesis, and I really hope she will get an offer soon. She deserves it, if not for the results for the effort she has put into this.

I had lunch with a visiting mathematician from India. She told us about her new, exciting project: being part of a commission advising the government on how to improve education across the country, particularly among the poorest people. They have already made big progress, but some states are apparently lagging behind. I found it cool that a government would ask actual scientists for such advice, and she answered that this is because both the President and the Prime Minister are or rather have been working in academia. I did let out a very, very small sigh.

I just spent one hour fixing the paper with PD#1 and S#6; it should be ready, if all is well, by the end of the month. I do resent that these two inexperieced people do not accept my suggestions but have their own views... except that about half the time their views are better than mine! The only thing in which I am obviously the best author is english spelling.

I recently found out that a workshop I co-organized last year has retroactively run out of money. I will now see what I can do to fix this, so that I don't get a reputation of cheating people out of their money.

Finally, I got an invitation for a kind-of-prestigeous conference. It's not very prestigeous, especially because obviously I have been called as a replacement for a last-minute defection, but it's not bad either.
And next week I am away at a conference full of old friends.

Maternal duties

When you have a child, you think the hard part will be pregnancy, or childbirth; you can even imagine that all the breastfeeding and diaper-changing might be a bit too mcuh, occasionally.
What nobody prepares you for is the later disgusting work. This morning, I spent two hours listening to about 100 children, age 4 to 6, singing and dancing. Two of them were mine, but most of the time I couldn't actually see them; i never could here them, of course.


Last year I didn't show up for the end of the year party, since I was in California; unfortunately, WS didn't understand that he should have gone. The twins were totally unhappy about being the only children whose parents were absent. So this year I did show up, put on feminine (drag?) clothing, and even prepared with my loving hands a large number of ham sandwiches.

Luckily another mother (with a PhD in condensed matter physics!) had taken a day off, so she collected a large number of children and drove away with them. So I was able to work a bit in the afternoon, but I wasn't very productive. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. The paper with PD#1 and S#6 is still very far from final form, and it's urgent.

Some parts of my job I really hate

I spent one hour with WS discussing the precise formulation of the acknowledgements in the paper, since we want to give everybody who helped us their due, but at the same time keep our merits. I then spent another hour with PD#1 and S#6 getting suggestion for a graduate school that I will possibly be giving next year and planning ahead a longer activity for the summer of 2009.
And now I have to go to an administrative meeting, which will be complete waste of time, but if I don't show up my already slim chances of getting a hire in my field will vanish utterly.

Real life commitments

I spent one week working on a book. A book of which I am supposedly a coauthor, that is. It should take, in my expectations, about one year to finish, if I can commit to it. I had the relevant coauthor, NeCo, visiting. He's a really nice person, only very very nervous. We made a lot of progress, plus now he set-up my internet connection at home.

I also gave to lectures at a nearby university, which was fun; attended a one day meeting with a lot of people I know well but hadn't seen in a long time, which was even more fun. And now, the planning for the summer is almost complete.. no wonder I didn't have time to update the blog.

On a different topic, the paper with WS got a bit delayed, but it should be up and running any minute now.

Back home

I wouldn't have thought that it would take me 16 hours to go home, but life is full of surprises. It's great to be with the children again. I miss them in some kind of animal way, so that when we see each other more than talking we spend a lot of time just touching each other - a typical scenario is for me to sit down with C#3 on my lap, C#2 on my shoulders, and C#1 sitting nearby while we take turn scratching each other's back.

Monday I spent most of the time talking to students, with some of them finally making progress. WS and I also put the final touch to our joint paper and sent it off to a number of selected colleagues for a preliminary opinion, before posting it on the web.
PD#1 is interviewing; when he comes back I think our joint work will get in final form.

Tuesday was again busy (S#4, PD#2) and choosing PD#3. The applicants were really good, to bad we have only one grant and not five or six. This morning, students again. I now chased S#9 out so that I can go to lunch.

It's not an end, it's a beginning

My stay at this research institute is coming to its end. Having a month with nothing to worry about but mathematics was an incredible boost: my paper with WS is essentially ready, and in my opinion much better than it was a month ago; my paper with PD#1 and S#6 is also morally ready, in that all significant ideas are now at our fingertips, and I expect it to go online by the end of the month; and despite occasional friction, I did learn a lot about the new subject that UnCo finds so interesting.

Still, I'm happy at the idea of going back to my family. I don't miss them much at the beginning (in fact, the feeling of freedom from responsibility is almost intoxicating) but as the days, and in this case the weeks, go by, I really want to be home.

Today I had so many last-minute preparations to do that I decided to skip a talk this afternoon - it was anyway more of a social event than a scientific one. I am essentially packed now, and tomorrow at this time I will be home.

Working again

This morning we had to talks, which were both extremely interesting for me. The first is directly in the field I want since a couple of years to start working in, and which is the specialty of PD#2. I heard a talk by one of the experts, which however appears to have missed a key development (=no serious concurrence). I also heard the comment of another expert, who on the other hand seems to be even more of a let's-go-abstract-and-general person than UnCo, and hence again is not likely to duplicate anything I do. Well, well.

The second talk was in my usual research field; I personally know all the four authors, and have actually been staying with two of them at some point in the past. It felt very satisfactory to sit through a talk, understand everything, guess how the argument was going to go on, and even be able to suggest an improvement in presentation. It is also an important result, and now I have understood the idea of the proof and feel confident that I can produce a similar result if need be.

This afternoon I worked again on the supposedly finished paper with WS. In the end we decided to add some stuff to the last chapter, so that it is set-up as general as is natural, and we can go on from there. Technically, we have to pass from schemes to DM stacks, and while the extension is morally obvious, there are a number of delicate technical details that have to be taken care of. But still, it's a joy to write.

UnCo is still feeling sick; he stayed home the whole day yesterday, and today showed up at noon thinking that the talks would be in the afternoon, as they usually are, and discovered to his dismay that he had actually missed both of them. I can now hear him laughing, so I suspect that while he's supposed to finish editing our paper, he's actually reading some funny website.

Mother's day is approaching

I am laughing alone in front of my computer. I just found The Onion's Mother's Day edition. After careful perusal, I think my favorite is the women's history timeline, especially the last point. It reminds me that I need to schedule a Pap test soon.

WS sent back the final version of the paper with a few changes. It still needs some very minor fixing, but it's really, really done. Wow.

I spent most of the day working on the project with UnCo, partially with him but mostly on my own. We did make some progress, not unrelated to my valiant effort to keep everything I know in a nicely readable file. UnCo is really smart, but occasionally the combination of "Don't bother to check that, I did that already" and "No, it appears I can't find the correct sheet of paper" can go on my nerves.

I also did non-research work, discussing whether a certain paper should at all be considered for a prestigious journal, and wrote a recommendation letter for a brilliant woman who's trying to get her first tenure position (with the almost usual two-body problem).

Before lunch I had the occasion to talk with the director of the research institute where I am visiting. I politely inquired why there was no information on their website about schools/Kindergartens/daycare centers in the area, to help parents planning a trip (this place usually ships the first invitation to a program three years ahead - I got mine with more than a year to spare). He answered courteously that they had considered it, but it was all so complicated that they decided to forget about it.

I asked whether he was aware that in this way the institute de facto discriminates against women scientists, since they are much more likely then men not to have a stay-at-home spouse who could invest a lot of time in searching stuff on the internet. I pointed out that adding a few links to the website of schools in the area and/or schools that offer bilingual programs didn't seem to require much effort. He said that he was sorry but after serious consideration they had decided that it was so much of a hassle to deal with kids that it really wasn't worth the secretary's time.

I am just wondering whether I should send a letter about this to him, and cc all the private organization which fund this place. With a link to Princeton, maybe. Where after all they do take women seriously.

Dinner conversation

The main argument of yesterday's conversation seems to me worth of a separate post, if nothing else because I think it was some remark of mine on this topic that induced the two senior colleagues in question to invite me to join them for dinner.

Mathematics is in one significant respect very different from most other scientific subjects: namely, most of the research done in the past decades is still correct and applicable. However, mathematical fashion changes, and the language of mathematics moves on: so, in time a natural selection occurs, and results that are perceived as important get incorporated in standard reference books, and the rest gets forgotten and sleeps in many a library shelf. In particular, history tends to be obliterated, and young people know definitions and theorems without knowing who first introduced or proved them.

However, in the period 1960-1970 my field had an incredible change of pace; tons of new ideas where introduced at a speed that most researchers of the time, not to mention a publishing system based on typewriters, had big problems keeping pace with. I am not a historian of science, but my impression at 40 years of distance was that the key point in this gargantuan enterprise was one person: Alexander Grothendieck. His ideas have changed the face of algebraic geometry as we know it, and lie at the base of many current famous results, most notably Fermat's last theorem.

My comment was that a large part of the work done in those years seems to have been forgotten and not passed on to the younger generations as it should have. I started thinking about this when Faltings, at the beginning of a course on algebraic stacks, explained that stacks were as important as schemes, but the generation that had had to digest schemes had refused to deal with stacks as well. In the same weeks, I was working my way through as much as I could understand (i.e., not much) of Grothendieck's mathematical testament, Récoltes et Semailles. There he expresses precisely the same viewpoint, namely that a lot of his work has been factually hidden from the eyes of the average working mathematician.

Whether this is due to someone's agenda (Grothendieck makes quite a few high-level names, which has made Récoltes et Semailles unpublishable) or it just happened, it is definitely time to go back, and retrace our steps. An impressive result in this direction is the re-edition of SGA1 and SGA 2 by the Société Mathématique de France; it is a LaTeX typeset and corrected version of some fundamental, typewritten notes from the early sixties, the kind of thing that an old enough library would have, but was difficult to get for private use. Now it is affordable to everyone (especially members of the SMF).

What I think is very significant is the way the typesetting was done: namely, a number of mathematicians from all over the world volunteered hours and hours of work to input, and correct the .tex file. It is, literally speaking, a labour of love.

My point yesterday was that we need more of this, both in the sense of re-editing (and making available in electronic form) old books, and also in the sense of translating the old books in modern mathematical language, so that everybody can read them. We should use the possibilities of the new media to produce a document which is readable at different levels; a short one for the experts, but one where one can just click on an unfamiliar name to read its definition, and on a step of the proof to find a more detailed version, including the details known to the experts.

And most of this has to be labor of love; but if we want it to happen, we have to start giving at least some credit to people who do the work. I am thinking of all the mathematicians who already are tenured, and who therefore are not any more under desperate pressure to publish. It shouldn't look like a hole in the cv if in one given year you have no paper but a beautiful edition/exposition of old, inaccessible stuff.

Let me finish with a beautiful sentence I heard at lunch not very many days ago by a colleague who is a bit older than me: "I could of course keep writing paper after paper. But there is so much beautiful mathematics out there that I don't know yet, and I want to read at least some of it before I die". Me too.

Paper finished!

First, the big news: in the afternoon I fixed the paper with WS! It is now essentially ready, and we might start to informally circulate it next week. Our first joint paper after the twins... how romantic. We definitely should dedicate it to them, as we did for the corresponding paper after the birth of C#1. Feel free to imagine me dancing, shouting, and drinking (the drinking part hasn't yet become reality, but I'll work on it later in the day).

Yesterday I had dinner with two much older colleagues. In fact, each of them is old enough to be my father. It was a very pleasant dinner, with a lot of historical and philosophical discussions. I hope I will stay as smart as I grow old. It also gave me back the feeling of being a young girl, which I had otherwise lost long ago.

This morning I didn't do maths. First I cleaned up my flat: I am by nature a total slob, but it was so dirty it started to bother me. As a reward for doing a good deed, I did see a hare from a very short distance. The last time I saw a hare was here, on my previous visit. I haven't seen any hare otherwise in my life.

Between yesterday and lunchtime I finished reading the four books I started three days ago: two lent by UnCo, and two bought by me in the local language, which I can read although not speak. It was really great. I love reading, and if books were alcohol I would have become a member of AA before I turned 5. Plus, the two books in the local language I'll read again and again, so that I can learn more words and expressions. The woman at the local bookstore gave me really good advice.

And then I cleared up for UnCo a misconception he had about an exact sequence. Tensor products are nasty things, and the notation we use is ambiguous and potentially confusing. Actually, it is standard since about four decades, so I think the correct viewpoint is that it's UnCo that gets easily confused, but I didn't tell him that.

Last Thursday

Last Thursday was a really good day mathematically. We had three talks. The first one was in the morning, by UnCo, about work which is partially joint with me. UnCo showed up late (saying that he's not a morning person is a vigorous understatement) and went 15 minutes overtime, but he gave a really great talk. I'm lucky at being able to learn from him.
The second one I gave, about joint work with PD#1 and S#7. The first afternoon talk is always a problem, since part of the audience (particularly mature, portly gentlemen) has a tendency to nap. Still, it was well received and got pleasant and useful feedback.
The third was by my student, and that led to a question by one of the mature portly gentlemen who, no doubt refreshed by the previous nap, alerted me to a very important 40-years old reference I had missed.

To cap the day, UnCo and I went for a pleasant long walk, had dinner together, and talked about Gott und die Welt until midnight, while finishing a well-deserved bottle of French wine. There are days when I really love my job.

Laboring Day

I celebrated Labor Day by working very hard the whole day. I met my student S#4 this morning, than I worked on the joint project with PD#1 and S#6, and
then I spent the afternoon discussing PDE's with UnCo. Turns out he couldn't solve a system of them because he was looking for a polynomial solution and the answer was an exponential function.

I cooked myself a decent dinner, and after another short chat with UnCo I watched a very good Kaurismaki movie, about a man who has forgotten his name and everything else. I like Kaurismaki, but this was the first time I saw a movie of his in the original finnish language. I am proud to say that I had no trouble reading the swedish subtitles.

C#3 is fine and healthy, it appears. So all is well that ends well. And tomorrow I will work hard again.

La notte porta consiglio

Roughly translated: sleeping over your problems helps you find a solution. Yesterday I sent to my young coauthors PD#1 and S#7 a severely revised version of our joint work. In the afternoon we had a joint skype phone call about it, and PD#1 made a few very good points about the exposition. And this morning I finally figured out what he meant, and also what we have to do so that the paper becomes more readable. Unfortunately, it involves a substantial amount of rewriting.

Yesterday I also decided that if I want to be any use in my current collaboration with UnCo, I will seriously learn to need some of the background material. Unfortunately, the relevant book is not in the library here, and even if I were to buy it immediately it might take at least one week and possibly much more until I get it. So I decided to buy it, have it shipped to my home address, and in the meantime I xeroxed the first few pages. I also decided to buy myself a new notebook and a couple of pretty pens to take notes with, but today being May 1st I will have to wait until tomorrow for that. I like the idea of going back to being a student; after all, that's something I can do much better than being a professor, and I had only such a short time of it.

Yesterday I also spent one hour with S#4 discussing his thesis project, and we have another appointment today. He certainly works hard, but is still proceeding very, very slowly. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for him.

Dream job?

Today I did something I haven't done in a very, very long time. I updated my cv and applied for a job. WS has done the same - it turns out they are advertising 5 jobs at the same time, at a top research university, in our favorite country. Unfortunately, our chances of getting two offers are virtually zero. It is a country where I know very few female professors, even less married ones, and none with more than one child. They have absolutely no plan for hiring couples; in fact, the expectation is that a wannabe professor should be free to move from one side to the other, and the way taxes work means that if the professor's spouse stays at home the professor's income receives a bog boost.
Of course despite the law being framed in completely gender neutral terms, the not surprising upshot is that women professors are few, far between, and childless.
Looking at my cv I was less than impressed. You can almost recognize my children's faces in the big, gaping holes: in the publications list, but also in the participation to conferences, periods of study aborad, etcetera. Now I have started being productive again, although as usual it takes longer than I thought. Yesterday I worked the whole day, so hard that I got a backache. Today I took it a bit easier. I have also decided to study a new topic, like if I were a student, from scratch. So now I'm going to switch off the computer, and go buy a new notebook and a few coloured pens: I was able to learn new stuff at 18, so I will just do what I did then, and hope it works.

Household duties and mathematical life

Here I try to focus on my work as a mathematician, but of course I also have the duties of every normal human being. In particular, today I spent quite a lot of time doing my laundry with an unfamiliar machine, and even more drying it with very mysterious objects (a real waste on a dry and sunny day).

As part of my lesser duties to the mathematical life, I went to lunch with a group of colleagues, and attended a really good talk by a young member of the Institute I'm visiting.
I have a long-standing prejudice that dutch mathematicians are trained to become really, really good lecturer: it goes back 20 years now, and the counterexamples (if any) are few and far apart. Today's talk confirmed the prejudice: it was very clear, extremely well organized, and managed to finish quite on time.

I received a sad email telling me that one of the top two applicants for our forthcoming postdoctoral position has accepted a (much better) offer somewhere else. I must admit not being too surprised, since I thought he was way too good for us; still, I hope the other outstanding candidate doesn't vanish the same way.

I have started studying a very beautiful book that a colleague has lent me: unfortunately, the library here doesn't have it, and as usual buying it will take at least two weeks. Of course had I been staying in the US I would have gotten it tomorrow (and cheaper too). It is part of the work for the project with UCo, and might help me understand what is really going on. At least I'm learning a beautiful piece of mathematics, something that a research scientist rarely has time to do (that might actually be a good topic for a detailed rant one of these days).

I also did write a couple more pages for the paper with WS, which hopefully is really going to be ready any day now.

WS and I are also discussing a much more serious issue, namely if we want to stay where we are or try to move to a different country. We both agree that in the country we are now we are in an optimal situation, but the question is whether somewhere else we could live better. Of course I am scared as hell at the thought of moving a whole family, have the kids get used to a new town/school/language etc, learning to fight with a different burocracy, and in general moving to a country with a lower precentage of female mathematicians (basically any move will have that effect).

On the other hand, as professors it is hard to move once you are 50+, and WS, despite looking like a teenager and for some things reasoning like an 8-year old, is not that terribly far away from the half-century mark. So if we want to go it better be soon, and whatever move we make is very likely going to be the last one. It is kind of comforting that I am not the only Female Science Professor entertaining similar thoughts of moving as a mid-career academic couple.

Working together

Many mathematicians prefer not to work alone. It is basically for the same reason why people who go mountain climbing don't go alone; having somebody nearby, as you explore an unknown and difficult territory, can help you avoid pitfalls and desaster, or find a brilliant shortcut. Plus, in the occasional breaks from intense thinking that must occur to preserve mental sanity, you have someone around to chat with.

I usually prefer to choose my coworkers among people I am close to anyway. In fact, I wrote my first joint paper with WS, who at that time was just a Wonderful Boyfriend. The next joint paper was written with FCo, my (so far only) female coauthor, a close friend who had been a student with me, on a topic which was very close to both our theses. I am very proud of that work, because it is the first of my papers where I didn't just prove the theorems but significantly contributed to the statements. All my papers so far had been suggestions of my advisor, except for the joint work with WS which was based on an idea of WS.

You may guess the next logical step: I wrote a paper with Ununderstandable Coauthor UnCo, a close friend of WS who had been a student with him. With time, I think that UnCo and I have also become friends. I am not sure because I still find him quite ununderstable, though.

A the same time, I started a collaboration with another friend who was had been a student with me: I'll refer to him as ImCo, for impressive coauthor, since when he applied for a job at the university where I was working, a colleague told me how he had been so impressed by this particular candidate. Except he used a word in my language which is much stronger than impressive, and which made everybody laugh. For the record, ImCo did turn down our offer, and has since only worked in Impressive Universities.

Excluding PD's and S's, my youngest coauthor is NeCo, my nervous coauthor. He's an extremely smart person who tends to worry overmuch about any mistake he might possibly make. When he's not talking about himself, which tends to be a very gloomy topic, he's a very pleasant person to spend time with; he also drinks precisely the correct amount so that, when having dinner together, we can order haf a liter of wine. NeCo works in a different country, but not too far away, so hopefully we'll see a lot of each other in the future.

I'll keep updating this page, so as to have all the coauthors together.

Working on a holiday

Today is a holiday in the country I usually live in, but not where I am now. I got up late. I'm ashamed how late it was... but it's all the fault of being at the Opera yesterday evening - and that is of course Good For My Culture, right? - and not at all to do with the time spent in a Tapas bar afterwards.

I spent half an hour talking to S#7, cleverly avoided S#4, and devoted the whole afternoon to working with my coauthor who's here, whom I'll refer to as my Ununderstandable Coauthor (UCo). UCo is also the one who thought of going to the Tapas bar to begin with, so it's all his fault (it's always somebody else's fault). UCo and I are working on a paper which needs methods from a field we are not at all familiar with. So we get all the hardship of learning from scratch something new, without the help of an advisor or of anybody else, and while having "grownup" pressure to publish. Plus, of course, not only white hair abound on both of our heads, but also the inside of said heads isn't as smart as when we were students in the last century.
So it's all pretty hard, and there's always a very nontrivial risk that whatever we end up producing, if nonempty, will be declared unreadable by people who work in our field and trivial by people in the new field.

Tomorrow morning I will have to get up early to do my laundry, and then I have scheduled a Skype chat with PD#1 and S#7 to discuss our joint work. The next few days are going to be really intense.

Slowmotion progress

I didn't work too hard sunday and yesterday. I did, however, finish my part of the paper with WS, and started seriously working on the paper with PD#1 and S#6. It turns out that PD#1 and S#6 are so worried about getting the mathematics right that the paper is coming out very unattractive, which is bad because people will not read it. The fact that they both see very well, and so chose a ten-point style with very narrow margins, also doesn't help in making the paper reader-friendly. So now I'm in the middle of a major meditation on how to write this all up nicely.

Today I also spent two hours and a half explaining a postdoc and a doctoral student here a more geometric version of a classical construction. Classical means more than 30 years old, but it still is not written in any textbook, and so young people find it hard to read. It turns out that I never read the old paper, and reconstructed the proof myself - ending up with a much simpler approach, which is no doubt familar to all the experts, but is not written down anywhere. So now hopefully these two young people (who are obviously a couple) will write it all up nicely.

I am happy for them and pleased to be of help, but I'm wondering what kind of field I'm in where it takes thirty years until key ideas get finally a reasonable expository form.

In related news, I spent one hour on the phone with WS and one with S#6 discussing the respective papers. Even in these very modern times, not everything can be done via email. Hopefully soon we will all have a webcam, and then we can collaborate wherever we are.

Now I have to hurry up and have a snack and a short walk, as I'm going to the opera tonight. Of course I have nothing really elegant to put on, but after all this is northern europe so I don't have to. Hopefully.