stoutfellow

1. Summer semester began this week. I won't be teaching, but I will be meeting twice a week with two students on their Senior Projects. (One of them is writing about the solution of Pell's Equation using continued fractions; the other is tackling Pascal's Mystic Hexagram.) The first session for each was yesterday; we've got a lot of work to do, if they're to present before the end of the semester.

2. I'm once again trying to establish the habit of cooking. Today, I made a batch of Pilaff à la Grecque - rice, onions, garlic, and mushrooms cooked in chicken stock with a bit of lemon, and sprinkled with toasted almonds and raisins. (The recipe actually called for olives in the topping as well, but I left them out. I don't much like olives.) The first helping was quite good, with a certain bite to it that previous pilafs I've made haven't had.

3. You know you've been playing altogether too much Skyrim when, watching a video on YouTube, you keep twitching the mouse, trying to change the POV. Also, you find yourself hitting the Escape key when you're done reading a web page. It's a lot of fun....

This was a longish week.

On Sunday, I made a big batch of spaghetti all'amatriciana. (Tomato/bacon sauce; I've made it a couple of times before.) Then, of course, I couldn't eat any of it on (Ash) Wednesday, nor on the following Friday. On top of that, on Tuesday I packed a Tupperware serving of it to take to work - and left it on the kitchen counter. (I ate that batch as soon as I got home that day, around 8:30, 9 o'clock.)

I wrote and gave midterms in all three of my classes. I suspect that some of my Abstract Algebra students are rather upset - with me, with themselves, who knows? In Linear Algebra, we're moving into more abstract stuff - general vector spaces, instead of just Rⁿ - and I gave what I think was a pretty good lead-in on Thursday. We'll see how they feel about it on Tuesday.

Still banging away at the new library database. I've run into and handled a few bugs, and it's in good enough shape that I've begun entering data; I haven't done the classification forms yet, though.

Weather's been up and down, mostly down, but we're supposed to move back into the 40s and 50s F starting tomorrow. Fine by me....

Most of my reading, so far this year, has been rereads - first the Dresden Files marathon, then other stuff. I'm rereading Glory Road now, and wondering why it appealed to me so, way back when.... I need to make an Amazon run sometime soon, for some new light reading. (My current bus books are volume two of Newman's World of Mathematics, and Stephenson's Reamde, which is entertaining so far but not exactly light reading.)

Monday Math should return on, well, Monday. I see a direction for the next half-dozen or so posts.

Gah. No mind for anything coherent just now. Let me get some rest....

I don't have any classes on Friday, so I stayed home today. I don't plan to make a habit of that this semester - rather the reverse - but there were things I wanted to do around the house.

1. I was originally scheduled to teach Differential Geometry this semester, but only one student signed up. At the same time, we had unusually high demand for Linear Algebra I - more than we'd allowed for. (Everybody in math, and almost everybody in science or engineering, takes LAI.) So, the Chair and Assistant Chair decided to cancel DiffGeo and instead give me a new section of LAI. As a side effect, not enough textbooks for the class were ordered - including one for, ahem, me.... Anyway, Monday morning there were 28 names on the class roster. Tuesday evening, after the first lecture, I was mobbed by students waving Add Class forms. By Thursday, the roster was up to 36. The enrollment cap for that course is 40, so we should be about done with that.

2. Tuesday, as usual, after a few introductory remarks, I asked my Linear Algebra students if they had any questions. One student raised his hand and asked what my ancestry was. I blinked, told him, and then asked for questions that were remotely related to the subject of the class. He looked suitably abashed; there were no further questions.

3. I've only got a dozen people in my History of Math class this semester; usually there's about twice that. I'm going to have to rejigger the group assignments, which were due for overhaul anyway.

4. My third course is the second part of our two-semester sequence on abstract algebra. I had about 26 people for the first semester, down to 11 this time - mostly, the people who got A's and B's in the first semester. That's fine with me, as the quality of the students lets me move from lecture toward dialogue. There are a number of sharp kids in there (and a couple whom even I can't call "kids").

5. The one student who signed up for DiffGeo is also in my History of Math and Abstract Algebra classes. I tried to arrange for him to take DiffGeo as a readings course, but apparently the Policy Committee put the kibosh on it. (I can understand their point; we have trouble filling some of our upper-level courses, and offering them as readings courses drains the supply of people to take them when they're actually offered. Still, this guy's a Engineering/Math double major, and he's got a very tight schedule as is; if he doesn't take DG now, he probably won't be able to take it next time. And I was looking forward to having him in that class....)

I went in early and stayed later than I'd intended, but I actually got some things done today.

I reviewed and red-inked a Senior Project (someone else is the director, but I'm on the committee) on voting theory - pretty interesting stuff, and a good bit of it appears to be original. I did this just in time, as the director dropped by to see if I'd attended to it yet. I went over the things I was bothered by; he'll bring the student in and get those problems (and the ones identified by W, who is the third member of the committee) taken care of.

There are some technical problems with the prisms paper. It's written in TeX, but not directly - I use the Scientific WorkPlace interface. Unfortunately, SWP speaks a slightly different dialect of TeX than the Moscow Mathematical Journal, and this is causing problems integrating the diagrams into the text. I downloaded a pure TeX editor and made some modifications which might help; if they don't, I'll have to think long and hard.

And, unexpectedly, I found time to work on the prisms problem again. Mostly I just tinkered today, making the visual representation easier to see and fiddling with the algorithms some more. But I did learn a thing or two in the process. Now, to make my experimenting a little more systematic....

Tomorrow I have classes, so I probably won't have time to mess around any more; Wednesday may be more productive.

It seems as though I will have another Senior Project student this year.

Every fall, the department offers Math 498, basically a seminar in writing and presenting a paper. At the beginning of the semester, whoever's teaching it sends around a request to the other faculty, asking for a list of SP topics they would be willing to direct projects on. This year, as usual, I submitted a couple of broad geometric possibilities, but added, as an afterthought, number theory. So, yesterday, a student dropped by to discuss a project in that area. After some discussion of her interests and background, I introduced her to the notion of convolution (as applied to number-theoretic functions), showed her how it tied together various important functions - number of divisors, sum of divisors, and the totient function, for example - and told her about the Moebius Inversion Formula. (This is a distant cousin of the Fourier Transform; the setup seems very different, but the same sorts of things turn out to be true.) She seemed excited by this family of ideas, but wanted to do some poking around on her own before she decided to commit.

We'll talk again, either about these ideas or, if she decides otherwise, about something else. I kind of hope she goes with it; I've been aware of these matters for quite a while, but I've never dug in and studied them myself, and it'd be interesting to see where she goes with it.

Well, I had ambitious plans for this week, and actually achieved a few of them.

Item: I've arranged an appointment at the groomer for Buster next Tuesday. (Apparently business has been brisk; though I called Tuesday morning, that was the earliest slot they had open.) This will be followed by a similar appointment for Gracie, and dental appointments for both. This will be a tad expensive.

Item: Thursday, I swept up the debris in the basement. I will have to deal with the spiderwebs next. (Some of them are door-sized; I'm thinking about just going down with a big towel and flapping it around everywhere.) Once that's done, I'll look into contractors.

Item: Friday, I woke up with a backache (possibly attributable to Thursday's labors). Still, I had to go onto campus for a committee meeting; while there, I put the finishing touches on the paper I co-wrote with CK and sent it off to Forum Geometricorum. (Title: "The Parallelogram Points of a Quadrilateral". I may talk about it at some point.) The backache seems to be subsiding, but has not done so completely.

Item: Also on Friday, I received a letter from Washington U (the one in St. Louis) informing me that my former student S has earned her doctorate and accepted a teaching position at UM-St. Louis. Glad to hear it; she's one of the sharpest students I've ever had.

Item: I'm currently reading a Library of America volume of short stories by Dashiell Hammett. Most of them concern an unnamed private detective (an employee of a nationwide company) in San Francisco; there's a certain amount of seriality to them, in that loose ends from one story are often resolved in a later one. (Not that the individual stories are incomplete, but one or more of the villains may escape justice for one caper, only to be brought down for another later.) Not a bad collection.

Item: I neglected to make any deposits to or withdrawals from my savings account for a couple of years, and the bank suspended it. They said I could reactivate it by making a deposit or withdrawal; they failed to tell me that I could not do this via ATM. After discovering this last, I filled out a form asking them to reactivate it. I will have to be more careful about this in future.

Item: I was just about to complain about something in my property tax bill, but just realized that a voided check (which I can provide) is not the same as a cashed check (which I cannot, as my bank stopped providing them years ago). Someday I will learn to read....

Item: In the turmoil following the retirement of one of our Stat people, schedules have been rearranged. I was scheduled to teach Calc I and a junior-level course in abstract algebra this fall, but will be teaching Engineering Mathematics in place of the calculus course. I've never taught that course (although its contents are familiar), and I haven't taught the other course in years. Much prep will be required.

Busy busy busy....

There's one more week of classes this semester, then finals - one sit-down, one take-home. I have a stack of papers from the History of Math class to grade, and Monday they'll be handing in their last group assignments. Two lectures in each class: Cantor and the philosophical debates of the late 19th / early 20th centuries in the one, the global Gauss-Bonnet theorem and its consequences in the other.

I'm tired. I'm glad I won't be teaching this summer; I need the break. Not that I'll be free of teaching-related responsibilities; one of my Master's students is about ready to begin writing up his thesis, and this will require quite a bit of supervision. Also, in fall I'll be teaching a course that I haven't taught in some years - a junior-level course in abstract algebra - and its content has changed in the interim, so I'll need to prepare for that. Still, I'm beginning to consolidate some of my ideas on the typology of polygons, and a couple of free months should help a lot with that.

My other Master's student gave her presentation yesterday, and passed easily. Her work was pedagogical in nature, a comparative study of the difficulty of linear algebra as compared to group theory, and investigation of the possibility of exposing students to the structural similarities of the two subjects as a means of improving their understanding. The results were fairly interesting, and I'll have to think about incorporating some of her suggestions into that abstract algebra course.

I'm feeling out of sorts this morning. My left ear has gone out again - can't hear a thing on that side - and I had a touch of a sore throat when I woke up. It seems to have dissipated now, but I'm still not quite comfortable. (Of course, lack of sleep may be involved; around 11:00, one of the neighborhood dogs started barking, which set off Gracie, which set off Buster....) I'm on my second cup of coffee, but it doesn't seem to be helping that much.

Weatherwise, the last week and a half have been a rollercoaster. Thursday the 12th was cold and damp, culminating in a couple of inches of snow that night and the next day. On the weekend, the temperature boomeranged back into the 60s F, melting most of the snow. At the beginning of the next week, it turned chilly again, this time with rain to wash away the last of the snow. Midweek was cold again, turning frigid on Thursday and Friday, culminating in freezing rain Friday night. Today wasn't too bad, although very wet - Gracie's been bouncing in and out, all muddy-pawed. The highs are supposed to hang in the mid-40s F for most of the coming week, after a round of thunderstorms tonight. At least the forecast is for clear weather starting tomorrow.

I more-or-less finished (no intro or bibliography yet) the first draft of my current paper last week, and immediately (as usual) decided it wasn't well-organized. Two of the sections I'd divided it into proved unexpectedly short; I'm going to chop one of them up and parcel it out to the two surrounding sections, and I think I see how to flesh out the other one. It's a short paper - I estimate maybe twelve pages when it's finished - but it's the right length for the online journal I'm going to submit it to. I've got two other papers out, but I'm still waiting to hear whether they've been accepted. Once I finish this one, I'll start thinking about how to write up my current research. (I doubt I'll actually write it until sometime next year; it's still kind of formless at the moment.)

My two Master's students are both making good progress. One is writing up her thesis, and hopes to present by mid-February. Her co-adviser and I are a little nervous about this one; it's the first thesis under the new Mathematics Education program, and we're not sure what the parameters for acceptance are going to be. As for the other, I suggested he shift his focus to a narrower range of the problem, and he surprised me by coming up with a complete answer to that subproblem. He then suggested which direction to go in next, and it looks both doable and interesting. I look forward to seeing what he comes up with.

What else? 1493 was interesting, but not as much of an eye-opener as 1491. I'm reading another volume in the Ring of Fire series, and have realized that I've pretty much lost track of who's doing what to whom; with such a large stable of authors and an enormous cast of characters, closer attention needs to be paid, but I'm not sure the series really merits it. My current bus book is a biography of Hugo Black; I was concerned by the hagiographic tone of the introduction, but the author isn't hiding Black's blemishes.

"Sinfest" is still on fire; Fuchsia's dilemma is getting more intense, since the appearance of the Storytime Zombie.

I'm not sure whether to be amused or horrified by the spectacle of the race for the GOP presidential nomination.

I don't really care about the football playoffs, at this point, but I'm looking forward to the baseball season. The Padres' farm system has started cranking out prospects, and they just began arriving at the end of last season. The next two seasons should be exciting. (Not that I expect the Friars to break .500 this year....)

Heigh-ho. I really should get back to my bookkeeping.

It's getting to be that time in the semester: one week of classes before Thanksgiving break, a week off, then two more weeks of classes and finals week is here. I've got two Senior Project students rushing to finish by the end of the term and a Master's student likewise. My other Master's student is feeling stymied, and has decided to drop back and broaden his approach to the problem. I'm on the committees for two more Master's students, and I'm hoping to finish off the prisms paper (I've given W and T copies of the pleaseGodplease final version for critique) and get another paper written up (I've already mapped it out in my head; all I need is time to write) - both before the end of the semester. Urk.

Meanwhile, I'm taking a new tack in my study of polygons, and it's looking very promising. Unfortunately, it's distracting me from all the other things I have to do.

Gracie and Buster are providing much of the tension relief at the moment, whether by falling over backward in excitement over a treat or just by curling up companionably next to me. Even the worst of days - and last Thursday was middle-ranking on that scale - has some good in it, thanks to them.

Oh, yeah. I also have to find time to observe three of our non-tenured faculty in the next three weeks. One of them teaches at 8:00 AM, which means I have to leave the house at 6:30. Oh, and have I mentioned the weather?

:runs screaming in circles:

A few notes before I take off for Reno...

I've done most of the necessary pre-trip things. I haven't packed yet, but my flight doesn't leave until 2:00 PM tomorrow, so there's time.

I just finished Barfield's The Perilous Frontier. An absolutely fascinating book; I should probably go back and reread my copy of A History of Chinese Civilization, now that I've got a framework to pin things to. I'll review the book after I get back from the con.

I also finished rereading Middlemarch. It's been thirty or so years, and I'm counting it as effectively a new read. (Of the four major plotlines, I remembered a fair part of one, fragments of a second, the barest skeleton of a third, and nothing at all of the fourth.) (FWIW: in order, Dorothea/Casaubon/Ladislaw, the Lydgates, Bulstrode, and Fred Vincy/Mary Garth.) Eliot retains her high position in my mental pantheon.

Classes start the day after I return from the convention. Fortunately, I only have one class on Monday, and it doesn't start until 2:00, so I'll have a little time to recover.

Apropos of nothing, but something I find absurdly pleasing: sometimes, when I'm petting Buster's chest, he'll hug my arm with his forepaws.

I haven't done anything about the prisms paper in several weeks; nor have I gotten any further with the more general prisms problem. I have, however, been working on spiffing up a joint paper with my former Masters' student CK; there are three more major results (out of eight or so) that I have to clean up. I hope to get this one and the first prisms paper out the door before the end of the year.

Websnark is back! I'd almost given up on them.

Looking forward to seeing... well, some of you... at Renovation!