The Narrow Road

The good news is that I am now gainfully employed in a full time job doing mathematics research. The bad news is that I have a lot less spare time to write new entries here. While the long term goal of eventually developing enough mathematics to motivate category theory and topos theory is firmly in place, the rate at which we get there will be drastically reduced. In the new year I am afraid that you can expect fewer entries, each of which will likely be shorter. Hopefully by reducing the quantity of work per entry and I can still keep them somewhat frequent (I am aiming for about 1 per month), and continue to advance toward the goal of motivating and explaining some of the truly interesting and inspiring ideas in modern mathematics.

This is a brief apology to let readers know that I am still working on the site. I have been otherwise occupied for several weeks, but the larger issue currently is that I am struggling to write the next entry “A Brief Tangent”. The reason for this is that I am battling to find the right way to introduce and discuss the ideas I wish to cover, and this has proved harder than I initially expected. Many words have been written, and not a small number erased again, and the entry is progressing slowly. I hope to be able to finish it in the next few weeks and get it posted. Thank you for your patience.

On Friday the 13th of July I successfully defended my thesis, entitled “Pro-finite Lie rings and p-adic Lie algebras“. From here I have only the minor hurdles of getting the Faculty of Graduate Studies to sign off on formatting, and organising copying and binding, to successfully complete my degree requirements. I will therefore be graduating in October, having moved to Ottawa at the end of this month, and gotten married to my fiancée Tuula on the 24th of August. For those who are curious, a copy of the my thesis can now be found in the PDFs section on the lower right; I can’t promise as to how understandable it will be for a general audience, but you may be interested to know what a mathematics Ph.D. thesis looks like.