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stoutfellowSomewhat related to the last post: Wednesday was a rainy day around here, and occasionally a thunderous one.
This week I began writing up the first of my papers on the taxonomy of polygons. Wednesday, I tackled a section centered on one particular rather finicky proposition. Basically, it said something like "Exactly one of situations A and B holds. In Situation A, Event X happens; in Situation B, Event Y happens". Proving it required a careful case analysis - "Suppose n is odd... Suppose instead that n is even, but not a multiple of four... Suppose, finally, that n is a multiple of four...." - and I went through the cycle "Write / Read / Think / Delete" several times before satisfying myself. I finally hit on the right way to distinguish A from B, and the most efficient way to prove X or Y, plus, as a bonus, the easiest way to handle one detail (in both cases) that I'd been kind of sluffing off.
Now, I write my papers using Scientific Workplace, which is a WYSIWYG shell sitting on top of a TeX engine; I've used it for, literally, decades. But SWP just upgraded from v5 to v6, and there is a definite learning curve. (There's at least one major improvement in v6, but a lot has changed, and v6 is not backward compatible with v5....) As a result, I found it necessary to repeatedly run Preview, so I could see whether what I'd written actually had the right appearance. Previewing the proposition I mentioned above, I saw one unsatisfactory bit, but I saw how to correct it, and did so. Then I saved, for the first time in something like an hour.
Literally two seconds later, the power went off.
(Yes, I know: waiting that long before saving is an act of folly. But they say the good Lord looks after fools and Americans, and I guess I qualify twice over!)
This week I began writing up the first of my papers on the taxonomy of polygons. Wednesday, I tackled a section centered on one particular rather finicky proposition. Basically, it said something like "Exactly one of situations A and B holds. In Situation A, Event X happens; in Situation B, Event Y happens". Proving it required a careful case analysis - "Suppose n is odd... Suppose instead that n is even, but not a multiple of four... Suppose, finally, that n is a multiple of four...." - and I went through the cycle "Write / Read / Think / Delete" several times before satisfying myself. I finally hit on the right way to distinguish A from B, and the most efficient way to prove X or Y, plus, as a bonus, the easiest way to handle one detail (in both cases) that I'd been kind of sluffing off.
Now, I write my papers using Scientific Workplace, which is a WYSIWYG shell sitting on top of a TeX engine; I've used it for, literally, decades. But SWP just upgraded from v5 to v6, and there is a definite learning curve. (There's at least one major improvement in v6, but a lot has changed, and v6 is not backward compatible with v5....) As a result, I found it necessary to repeatedly run Preview, so I could see whether what I'd written actually had the right appearance. Previewing the proposition I mentioned above, I saw one unsatisfactory bit, but I saw how to correct it, and did so. Then I saved, for the first time in something like an hour.
Literally two seconds later, the power went off.
(Yes, I know: waiting that long before saving is an act of folly. But they say the good Lord looks after fools and Americans, and I guess I qualify twice over!)
