What do I do?
A lot of people ask me what I actually do as a logician who's ABT but feels miles away from a T. It's a decent question and the advisor meeting I've just had gives a pretty decent snapshot. Ofcourse, in addition to this kind of stuff, I also teach, go to seminars and engage in various "professional activities".
I'd been reading a paper (Jensen's original work on Fine Structure for those who care). While I'd been reading it, a few little problems had suggested themselves to me: things he asserted without proof that didn't look obvious to me, wondering what happened to the theorems when you jiggled the hypotheses a bit, thinking about whether these two things he'd defined differently might not in fact always come out the same (they won't), etc.
I'd solved a few of these questions and presented the proofs to my advisor. Two of them were right but the other not only was wrong but purported to prove something false. He explained to me why my proof didn't work and we worked through a couple of ways of actually proving the claim was false. I liked the one I came up with after he said "you do know that foo is the same as bar don't you?" (No! I hadn't even thought bar had anything to do with it, and I think bar is cool so that's good), but he came up with a much slicker one.
We then discussed some of the big picture of what's going on (theme: nothing comes for free; the first time you get blah, you don't get blah plus epsilon) and what I'd read for next week (a more modern exposition of the same stuff).
Right now I'm off to brave the supermarkets on Turkey Day Eve so as I can spend tomorrow morning cooking. (Potatoes dauphinoise [for those who care]_{mark two}).
I'd been reading a paper (Jensen's original work on Fine Structure for those who care). While I'd been reading it, a few little problems had suggested themselves to me: things he asserted without proof that didn't look obvious to me, wondering what happened to the theorems when you jiggled the hypotheses a bit, thinking about whether these two things he'd defined differently might not in fact always come out the same (they won't), etc.
I'd solved a few of these questions and presented the proofs to my advisor. Two of them were right but the other not only was wrong but purported to prove something false. He explained to me why my proof didn't work and we worked through a couple of ways of actually proving the claim was false. I liked the one I came up with after he said "you do know that foo is the same as bar don't you?" (No! I hadn't even thought bar had anything to do with it, and I think bar is cool so that's good), but he came up with a much slicker one.
We then discussed some of the big picture of what's going on (theme: nothing comes for free; the first time you get blah, you don't get blah plus epsilon) and what I'd read for next week (a more modern exposition of the same stuff).
Right now I'm off to brave the supermarkets on Turkey Day Eve so as I can spend tomorrow morning cooking. (Potatoes dauphinoise [for those who care]_{mark two}).