(no subject)
Well, I've now been in Rio de Janeiro for 2 days.
It's SO beautiful here. Mountains on one end, beach on the other, and sometimes a mixture of the two.
The conference is going well so far - a bit more geometric analysis than I'd like, but still good nonetheless.
I don't really want to take the time to pen all my thoughts (they'd be mostly incoherent and poorly written anyway), but suffice it to say that the food is amazing (even sans sushi). The language is coming along as good as could be expected. Tomorrow we go to the beach for awhile.
More mathematically related - the "one detail" in the 4-d case turned out NOT to work like I had hoped. Today I started patching it up. Made good progress, just, well, "one detail" left to go on the patching. Again I'm reasonably confident it will work out, but we'll see.
5-d case is at a standstill. I've begun learning how to crunch out stiefel whitney classes of biquotients, but so far life isn't go well. Today, Ravi Shankar asked if a certain exotic RP^5 (there may only be one?) could be written as a biquotient. Now I'm intrigued (and have no idea, since I've only been focusing on the simply connected ones since rational homotopy theory works MUCH nicer for simply connected spaces).
6-d case is also at a standstill, simply because lately I've been focusing on 4 and 5-d.
I haven't begun to think about 7-d.
I miss Sara.
It's SO beautiful here. Mountains on one end, beach on the other, and sometimes a mixture of the two.
The conference is going well so far - a bit more geometric analysis than I'd like, but still good nonetheless.
I don't really want to take the time to pen all my thoughts (they'd be mostly incoherent and poorly written anyway), but suffice it to say that the food is amazing (even sans sushi). The language is coming along as good as could be expected. Tomorrow we go to the beach for awhile.
More mathematically related - the "one detail" in the 4-d case turned out NOT to work like I had hoped. Today I started patching it up. Made good progress, just, well, "one detail" left to go on the patching. Again I'm reasonably confident it will work out, but we'll see.
5-d case is at a standstill. I've begun learning how to crunch out stiefel whitney classes of biquotients, but so far life isn't go well. Today, Ravi Shankar asked if a certain exotic RP^5 (there may only be one?) could be written as a biquotient. Now I'm intrigued (and have no idea, since I've only been focusing on the simply connected ones since rational homotopy theory works MUCH nicer for simply connected spaces).
6-d case is also at a standstill, simply because lately I've been focusing on 4 and 5-d.
I haven't begun to think about 7-d.
I miss Sara.