Back to Basics

[stoutfellow]

Yesterday, in the geometry seminar, I was explaining some stuff I'd worked out over the weekend. Just as I was coming to the climax - the point where I could give them numbers instead of just theory - the fire alarm went off.

It is, after all, finals week.

Prof. W suggested that I take the chalk with me. ("To write on what?" "The sidewalk, of course!") When we got outside, I stooped to redraw the relevant equations and a couple of pictorial examples. At that point, Prof. W snapped my picture. (He has promised to send it to me, and not to post it on the Internet.)

We spent the next ten minutes or so - until the all-clear sounded - discussing things and working examples, as I continued to draw on the sidewalk. Fortunately, no Roman soldiers showed up to step on my drawings.

Comments

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Hm. Doesn't the cliche say that it's the unexpected stuff that's most worth looking at?

On my side: my part of the problem we're working on deals with a whole family of polyhedra, each identifiable by one particular angle, which can be anything between 0 and 90 degrees. In the good part of the seminar, I gave them a nearly complete explanation of what happens in the 60-degree case. That case has some very special properties, which make it easier to see what's going on. The less-good part came when I tried to extend those methods to the general case, because I hadn't quite worked out some technical details; I was trying to show them how I hoped to overcome those obstacles, and kept running into "wait, how's that going to work, given that :blah blah blah:" responses. (The responses were perfectly valid, and I wasn't explaining very well, partly because, as I said, it wasn't fully clear in my own mind yet. Still isn't, but I think I'm gaining ground.)