Last week was the first of the big 3-manifolds events at IAS and overall, it was spectacular. The highlight, without a doubt, was Dave Gabai being amazing during the last talk of the week, but there were some other great moments too…

…and some not-so-great ones, including some woman whom I don’t know interrupting Genevieve Walsh‘s talk no fewer than 10 times to say random rude things about how it was not-good (which was untrue), unoriginal (only true in the sense that Dr. Walsh spent some time talking about general background that she didn’t claim to have invented), and a waste of time. I was pretty blown away that such things happened at pure math talks, but I guess pure math people are people too and – at the end of the day – people just look for a way to disappoint and/or bring down other people.

I learned a lot, though, and I came away with a new direction for my own research, so that’s going to be the goal moving forward: To balance the somewhat-regular yearly 3-manifolds talks at IAS with the stuff I need to figure out to get my own stuff knocked out.

Oh, and plus side: I actually got a full week of salaried work done! YAY FOOD! But the downside is that I’m having to drop $2k on random car things (making our tires able to withstand rain and snow and making it so that our heat keeps hypothermia at bay), so…YAY CREDIT CARD DEBT! ::wink::

Alright, well I’m awake for some dumb reason so I guess I’ll…try to do something…constructive. Or something. Hah.

Later, guys.

Had a great first week at IAS. Their math library is fucking unreal and it gave me a chance to read about tons of stuff I should have already read about but haven’t.

The end result is that I did very little in terms of wage earning, and in particular that our savings is down to approximately $0 and if I don’t start earning pay soon we’re going to starve. Even so, the math library here…?

Tomorrow is the first day of the year’s first directed workshop-thing on 3-manifolds (http://www.math.ias.edu/wgso3m/agenda) and I’m indescribably excited about that. I’ve also gotten to a point where I have a schedule in place to earn a livable wage between all that (yay no starvation!) and will hopefully be able to parlay some of the awesome math I’ve been absorbing into things to post here…

…but today is not that day. ::wink::

Yours in math….

Giving “crowdfunding” a shot

Giving “crowdfunding” a shot

I decided to write up a little spiel about myself and my journey through mathematics, hoping to convince some amazingly generous benefactor to share their good fortune. While I’m hoping to procure funding from other sources (always applying, always hoping), it’s good to have another option, just in case.

I’ll try to keep everyone posted on how this plays out. 🙂

Reading, and reading, and teaching, and reading, and reading, and…

So, to summarize the direction of my most recent mathematical endeavors: I woke up and decided that part of my aspiration was to become a geometric topologist, and I did that despite the fact that topology is (far and away) my worst subject.

That sounds precisely as terrible as it probably is.