# Update

Despite my hope to the contrary, it would appear that the math I’ve done while here so far as not parlayed into me blogging super-frequently. For what it’s worth: Life is busy. Just in case you were wondering. ^_^

Lately, I’ve been working from home more than I’ve been going to Princeton/IAS. My goal is to change that soon and I actually had a wonderful day at IAS today. I’d like to go tomorrow but I have a work meeting at the least convenient time one can imagine; there’s also no topology seminar at the University tomorrow, so I suppose I’ll be staying in and working again. No harm no foul, I suppose.

So what have I been working on? Well:

• Universal Circles for Depth-One Foliations of 3-Manifolds. The gist here is: If you have a taut (e.g.) foliation on a 3-manifold, a theorem of Candel says we can find a metric on all the leaves so that they’re hyperbolic. Moreover, by tautness, you can lift to a foliation of the universal cover which is then a foliation whose leaves are hyperbolic discs. A ridiculously deep idea of Thurston was to look at the infinite circle boundaries of these disk leaves and maybe…glue them together? Canonically? And see if that gives insight about things?

You probably already know how this ends: It’s doable (because he’s Thurston) and it does provide deep insight about the downstairs manifold (see, e.g., the articles by Calegari & Dunfield and/or Fenley, or Calegari’s book…)

Now, let’s say we do this for certain classes of kind-of-understood-but-still-unknown-enough-to-be-interesting foliations like those of finite depth. Can we get cool manifold stuff by doing this process? I dunno, but maybe.

• Homologies. My ATE was about Gabai’s work on foliating sutured manifolds, so studying sutured manifolds is something I’m still interested in. One way of doing that nowadays is with this colossal, ridiculously-powerful tool called Sutured Floer homology. So…you know…homology…but when talking with other grad students about the millions of homologies out there and about how nobody really understands what motivates discovers of them, I realized that there was a lot I needed to know before focusing on one homology foreverever. So I’m working on learning stuff about homologies.
• Geometric Group Theory. Ian Agol is at IAS this year as the distinguished visitor and a lot of his work is on relationships between GGT and 3-manifolds. If you listen to any talk relating those two things, you realize there’s this whole dictionary of words and acronyms like QCERF and LERF and RAAG and Virtually SpecialResidually Finite, etc. etc. I think in order to someday bridge the gap towards doing work like those guys do, I need to know what all these words mean, and what better time to figure that out than right now?! So yea…I’m doing that some, too.
• Dirac Operators, Spin manifolds,…. At some point soon, I’m going to start working on hypercomplex geometry again, and part of that will be the study of Dirac operators. So far, there are lots of perspectives on those, so we’re going to try to first establish the explicit connections between them and then maybe…do some stuff? I dunno. I also have stuff on Clifford analysis / geometry I want to look at, as well as some more things involving generalized geometries. Lots here.
• Topological Quantum Computing. This is a pipe dream until I’m able to feed my family and progress on my dissertation. It’s on the radar, though.

Okay, so this was an update! I’ve also been bookmarking some interesting proofs I’ve run across so I’ll know where to look when I decide to expand things here, and…yea.

Oh! And my professional webpage finally exited alpha and went into beta! http://www.math.fsu.edu/~cstover.

And now, Morrrr…se homology. Morse homology. That’s what I’m looking at as a segue into Floer. Another late night ftw!

Later.

# Update

I’ve fallen into a bit of mathematical stagnancy since the first week or so of living here but after much ado, I’ve finally become regimented enough to start doing work and doing math and juggling other obligations, etc. etc.

What can I say? Moving is hard business!

Since falling off the mathematical (and career) wagon, I have managed to buy some new math books (uber sale; it’s my weakness) and to completely build a 95%-ish complete version of a new professional homepage which I hope to deploy within a week or so. As of a few days ago, I also managed to climb back on to the career (sans math) wagon, and as of today (well, yesterday; it’s 4:30am “tomorrow” for me right now), I also managed to do some low-key math with my BFF L. Hoping that pans out.

Later today, I’m going to head to IAS and spend the day doing math things and listening to postdocs talk about stuff I’ll likely never be mature enough to comprehend. Hoping this is day 1 of a lot of consecutive days of doing that and/or things like it. We’ll see.

Mathly yours…

# Random Update, or A Prologue to Travel

Okay, so I’m almost never around these parts anymore. That’s probably obvious to anyone who lands on the home page. Aside from “the random question regarding Hatcher problems” (read: the random pointing out of something very stupid I did when attempting to solve problems from Hatcher), I usually don’t receive many updates regarding this place either.

Truth be told: This place is essentially a wasteland. That makes me at least mildly sad.

I’d like to attempt to remedy that at least somewhat, and in order to attempt such an endeavor, I’ve brainstormed a plan. Before sharing, perhaps I should preface:

I’m about to be traveling quite a bit.

In particular, I’m going to be leaving on Friday (20 June) for approximately five weeks. My travels will include extensive bus rides that will land me in Ithaca, New York, Boston, Massachusetts, and Newark, New Jersey (en route to Staten Island, NY) and will include a variety of math- and computer science-related things.

Much excitement is expected on the professional front.

I figure this makes for at least a somewhat worthwhile opportunity to update this thing, though, since I could use it as a sort of travel diary. Truth be told, I’ve never traveled much, so I don’t know what exactly a travel diary entails; I figure I can come here, vomit out some photos and maybe a video diary or two, and hope that the inspiration I get by being surrounded by greatness will provide me the motivation to at least type up a summary entry or two on some fascinating stuff.

Long story short: Ostensibly, I should be able to post without having to rigorously type up mathematics I’m working on (or attempting to work on). That’s a win.

So yea…I’m at T-minus 51(ish) hours before my first bus departs. There’s lots to do, and so I won’t stick around here much longer. I will try to cough up a legitimate update, though; it’d be silly for me to start a travel diary without at least trying to piece together some sort of update on the journey behind the journey.

In the meantime, I hope this finds the internet in good spirits.

Yours in math,

C

# Foliation Theory Observation I

Observation I. Every article in this field is remarkably long.

I’ve currently got articles whose lengths are 60, 58, 50, 39, 59, 56, 58, 76, and 50 pages long in my “reading queue”. Of the others, there are none that are shorter than 25 pages with the exception of Gabai’s second article (18 pages, though sandwiched between a 60 page original and a 58 page triquel).

One would think that longer automatically implies “more detailed” (i.e., less terse, less difficult to read, etc.), but this isn’t necessarily the case; in particular, Gabai’s articles are ridiculously complex and brilliant and amazing, and even legitimate 3-manifold topologists specializing in foliation theory confess that it takes forever (literally not literally) to make it through even one of them.

My prediction is that when my son’s in college, the average math Ph.D. will take 10 years. Give or take.

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.

Spending a lot of time on the precalc class I’m teaching this semester, too.

A routine is finally starting to shape up, which means things are getting back to normal; I’m hoping blogging becomes a part of that again. Hoping.

Right now, I’m learning about surface automorphisms in hyperbolic space and working on collecting a library of data about the current status of classifications of manifolds with hypercomplex structures. I’m downloading articles constantly, reading seemingly nonstop, and always feeling behind.

I couldn’t be happier.

Here’s hoping that the new year is being as kind to all you folks!

# What’s been goin’ on…

So, I’ve been doing a piss-poor job of keeping this part of the internet pruned and tended to, etc. I’ve decided to stop in and give this thing a good once-over with how the semester’s been going now that the semester is (finally) nearing its end.

• My teaching assignment this semester was awful. I’ve been unimpressed mostly throughout.
• I gave two seminar talks at FSU’s complex analysis seminar: Complex Structures on Manifolds and Constructing Complex Manifolds Using Lie Groups. The first went pretty okay; the second was very spur of moment and came when I was in the middle of battling the flu and was unsurprisingly less-good.
• I’ve had two bouts of exams so far this semester and have managed to escape both with A averages.
• I recently concluded the two mandatory class-related presentations I had for the semester: I talked about Frobenius’ Theorem on the integrability of $k$-plane distributions for my Riemannian Geometry class, and about Hyperkähler manifolds for my class on Complex Manifolds. Like above, the first of these was pretty okay and the second was kinda “meh”.

That last point is one I’m particularly happy about.

As I tend to do, I managed to pick a path that’s not the standard among students (from what I can tell) in that I picked two advisors who work in two totally unrelated fields. Be that as it may, however, I’ll officially be under the tutelage of Drs. Sergio Fenley and Craig Nolder who – respectively – study geometric topology and hypercomplex analysis/geometry. For Dr. Fenley, I’m going to be studying various aspects of foliation theory; for Dr. Nolder, I think I’m going to be studying various aspects of lots of different things.

To say I’m excited would be an understatement.

Currently, then, I’m in the process of balancing end-of-semester duties and candidacy prep duties, which means I basically haul giant stacks of books around with me 24/7 and try to read any time my eyes/brain aren’t needed for something else. It’s exhausting and nerve-wracking and brain-intensive and amazing and surreal. I literally can’t express how excited I am.

When classes start back on Monday, there will be one week of non-finals classes followed by one week of finals; over the course of those two weeks, I’ll have lots of TAing to do and lots of exams to take. When those weeks are over, though, I’ll be enveloping myself in reading roughly 20 hours a day.