I am in Ischia, an island off of Naples, Italy. It's wonderful. I'm at a group theory conference. I just got bit by a mosquito, which normally I would find annoying, but which I find kind of amazing considering the morning I left Connecticut, I was late for class because of heavy snow that had basically shut down I-95 during the morning commute. ( Read more... )

Friday afternoon kicked off the conference in honor of Carol Wood's retirement and it continued for the whole day Saturday. My two favorite talks occurred the first day. Angus Macintyre talked about fields with exponentiation, which has always tickled my fancy despite my never having worked on that topic. And surprisingly, I found Charlie Steinhorn ( Read more... )

The long weekend has been going well so far. Friday we went out to dinner with Christian's colleague Jelena. Saturday we went on our typical grocery run, but took Cai Cai with us. Then we dropped her off at home so we could all work for a few hours, before she showed up at our apartment in the evening for dinner. We made a delicious dinner, cooked ( Read more... )

Despite classes only starting yesterday, I've been really busy for the past month trying to get a lot of things done because of rapidly approaching deadlines. For example, I thankfully realized yesterday afternoon that yesterday was the abstract deadline for the ASL contributed session in San Diego in January. I put together an abstract quickly on ( Read more... )

When I got back from Madison, I knew I had to buckle down because I only had one month to get things done before classes began. I had to get publications out, prep for classes, potentially apply for a grant, referee a paper, and get my materials ready for this fall's job search. I've had one old paper that just needs its introduction revised with ( Read more... )

Had one of my last meetings with Tuna today. We decided to plan out our paper a little and then we sat and talked about the open problem that we had made progress on but not yet solved. I noticed one small observation and then an hour later I was able to prove our result for the nilpotent class 2 case. Two hours later, I tried a technique I had ( Read more... )

Tuna and I now have Theorem #2 for our joint paper. We had been stuck for a couple weeks on showing one particular fact. This fact also came up in Theorem #1, but there we had an additional hypothesis that let us prove it without much trouble. But in the setting for Theorem #2, we couldn't find an argument and so we had even begun looking for ways ( Read more... )

I should mention that on Monday I had a meeting with Tuna, my first in two weeks since leaving for Buffalo. Due to jetlag and getting back on top of life in Lyon, I hadn't had much of a chance to think about our problem, but I spent about an hour Sunday thinking about it. I thought maybe we could get away without proving a certain statement in full ( Read more... )

Dammit, why does this always happen? There's a conference early this summer that's dedicated to a topic for which I would have the perfect, perfect talk... if I had already started on a particular research idea I had. But it's one of the research ideas I've put off while trying to finish up some other ones and now I would basically have to work ( Read more... )

Yesterday was Armistice Day, which I hadn't realized until late the night before. Julien and J-L didn't get my email in time, so they woke up before 8am, as planned, and called me. In my groggy voice I apologized in terrible French and said I didn't have seminar that morning so we could go to the market at the more reasonable hour of 10am. That was ( Read more... )