Friday, April 12, 2024

Reading Old Writings

Due to some basement flooding, I have been airing out the paper contents of a box containing my old writings. These consist primarily of a set of notebooks, starting from when I was an adolescent traveling in Europe, through to when I was in graduate school. I stopped routine writing when I had to concentrate on the final PhD exams. There are a few entries from the years when I was first married and later. There are also various sketches and pictures as well as some old letters. 

The vast majority of what I wrote concerned my attempts to find my own way through some kind of constructivist/idealist logic. Looking back at it, it looks like mostly gobbledygook. A great deal of clarity is provided by today's theory of the Moving Topic. I also wrote about loneliness, looking for sex and love, and about the first years of marriage when I wasn't happy. My early years in Minneapolis in graduate school were particularly painful but also fun in their own way. Luckily things began to warm up when I left academics and there are traces of a happier person emerging. 

There are also some old math papers published and un-published. I am pretty sure I was on the edge of some good math but was not a strong enough thinker to pull it off. For example the theory of bi-measures holds hints about solving the Blaschke inversion transform [finding a domain shape from its distribution of chord lengths] using the Bmn(). And the theory of derivatives of the associate function being Tauberian and all my struggles to define asymptotic behavior of a curve in terms of "basis" curves with simple derivative behavior. I did not pull these things over the finish line and I blame my weakness.

There are plenty of surreal pictures and surreal poems and stream of conscious bull. There is a naturalism that I can be proud of and a flawed character that -what can you say- I had to live with.

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