This and That
Jun. 15th, 2005 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowJust a quick post; classwork and other responsibilities have been preoccupying me for the last few days, whence the dearth of recent posts.
I just finished reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. That is a wonderful if leisurely book.
I've been looking again at the ideas from my New Year's paper, and things are flowing again; I may get another paper out of it fairly soon. (I made a conjecture a couple of weeks ago, on the basis of no information whatsoever; on Saturday, while walking the dogs, I found a proof. A number of other results have followed hard on its heels, linking up with other work I did a year or two ago.)
I'm trying to deal with some erosion holes that have appeared in my yard. Sunday I took my Radio Flyer over to Sears Hardware (getting a number of strange looks en route) and bought four bags of soil; I loaded them into the Flyer and hauled them home (and the strange looks now were accompanied by smiles and waves). I filled the biggest of the holes, but I think I'll need to do more. Part of the ground near the south side of the house has developed a gradient, sloping down towards the house. This is very bad, but I have some ideas how to handle it. Next Saturday will be strenuous...
The combinatorics/graph theory class is going well so far. Unfortunately, we have only eight weeks to cover fifteen weeks' worth of material, so I'm having to go at a rapid clip (and a few students have already had to bail as a result). However, the students are participating well, and several of them are able to answer questions on the fly. (Not always correctly, mind you; that would be too much to ask...) We covered Euler cycles and Hamilton circuits last night; next up are various graph-theoretic algorithms - minimal spanning trees and the like.
I just finished reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. That is a wonderful if leisurely book.
I've been looking again at the ideas from my New Year's paper, and things are flowing again; I may get another paper out of it fairly soon. (I made a conjecture a couple of weeks ago, on the basis of no information whatsoever; on Saturday, while walking the dogs, I found a proof. A number of other results have followed hard on its heels, linking up with other work I did a year or two ago.)
I'm trying to deal with some erosion holes that have appeared in my yard. Sunday I took my Radio Flyer over to Sears Hardware (getting a number of strange looks en route) and bought four bags of soil; I loaded them into the Flyer and hauled them home (and the strange looks now were accompanied by smiles and waves). I filled the biggest of the holes, but I think I'll need to do more. Part of the ground near the south side of the house has developed a gradient, sloping down towards the house. This is very bad, but I have some ideas how to handle it. Next Saturday will be strenuous...
The combinatorics/graph theory class is going well so far. Unfortunately, we have only eight weeks to cover fifteen weeks' worth of material, so I'm having to go at a rapid clip (and a few students have already had to bail as a result). However, the students are participating well, and several of them are able to answer questions on the fly. (Not always correctly, mind you; that would be too much to ask...) We covered Euler cycles and Hamilton circuits last night; next up are various graph-theoretic algorithms - minimal spanning trees and the like.
