Saturday 5 November
My friend Allan in Edinburgh asked me some time last spring if I would be the external examiner for his student's PhD thesis. This is a chore that one only undertakes as a favour to a friend, because universities pay a derisory fee for it and it means having to read and (more or less) understand 150 or so pages of highly technical material. The thesis was submitted at the end of June and I struggled through the first chapter or two in early July. Then summer intervened and I lost the appetite for reading concentrated mathematics. The internal examiner also took his time getting to grips with the thesis, and we eventually decided that the only way to force ourselves to get on with the job was to set a date for the oral examination. The candidate agreed that this should take place on 3 November, so for the previous week I sweated to make sense of the thesis and to think of suitable questions to ask at the oral.
I went up to Edinburgh on Wednesday and stayed overnight with Allan. I was glad to have the chance to talk to him about plans for next year's Scottish holidays, and also to discuss my planned itinerary in South Africa next February. Allan was raised in South Africa and had lots of useful information for me as well as lending me a good road atlas of the country.
The PhD oral took place on Thursday morning. It started off a bit shakily. I tried to make the candidate feel relaxed by congratulating him on an excellent thesis and telling him that there was no question of finding fault with it, we just wanted to chat about some of the ideas he had developed. I then started the actual questioning by asking him a really simple question about the background to the thesis. But the poor guy was so psyched up to deal with the intricate technicalities of the thesis that my naive question totally floored him, and he tried to approach it from a completely inappropriate and much too sophisticated level. It took a few minutes to bring him down to earth and to settle his nerves. But after that, he relaxed and dealt very impressively with the rest of the questions.
From my point of view, I was nervous that my questions would betray to the candidate how superficially I had read his thesis and how little of it I really understood. After all, he had over three years to study this subject intensively, and I had to make sense of it in just a few weeks. (Sometimes I wonder whether a PhD oral is more nerve-racking for the examiners than it is for the candidate.) But I needn't have worried. The rest of the discussion went very well. After the oral, the two of us who were examining the thesis, together with the candidate, and Allan his supervisor, went for a celebratory lunch. Then I went off to the station for the journey back to Leeds, and the candidate went off to a bar for some more intensive celebrations with his friends.
Earlier this year I wrote about the stray grey cat that appeared at our back door, and then became a regular visitor when Mary took pity on it and started to feed it. Before long, it was coming to the door twice a day (hardly surprising, seeing that it got a sachet of Sainsbury's best cat food every time). Then we went to Spain for a couple of weeks in September. When we came back, there was no sign of Greybags (as Mary called the cat). She thought that it must have found another family to scrounge off. I was more inclined to guess that it hadn't survived Mary's absence, seeing what a timid, unhealthy-looking little creature it was. For over a month, we saw no sign of it. Then one day it reappeared as though nothing had happened. Of course, Mary started buying cat food for it again, and now it comes to the back door, regular as clockwork, for breakfast and dinner. It is still as nervous as ever, and runs away whenever anyone comes near it.
Recently, Mary started fretting that the poor cat would have nowhere to shelter from the rain and cold, with winter coming on. She unblocked the space under the garage that we had closed off to keep out the foxes, so that it could have a secure refuge. She also twisted my arm to construct what she calls a catport (on the analogy of carport) so that Greybags can have somewhere to eat without getting wet. I actually quite enjoy little construction jobs like that. I never throw away old bits of wood and other building materials, and it always pleases me if I can cobble together something entirely out of these leftovers without having to buy anything. In this case I used an upturned drawer from some long-forgotten piece of furniture, together with bits of an old roll of roofing felt and a few sticks of wood, to make a serviceable little shelter by the back door. It's nothing much to look at, but the cat appreciates it.
Greybags breakfasting in the catport
Saturday 12 November
The site counter at the bottom of the page gives details of the search strings used by visitors who come to the site through a search engine. I find it interesting to repeat the same search (a habit I learned from Bruce). Partly it's just vanity, to see how high up the rankings my site comes in the search engine's listing. But mainly it's a way to discover other sites that have dealt with themes that interest me, and I quite often come across some real gems that way.
About a month ago I did a journal entry on Goethe's poem Erlkönig. Google must have got around to indexing it pretty quickly, because a couple of days ago somebody reached that journal page through a search for the line that I quoted from the poem: "Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt". I repeated the search, and discovered that my October journal page is no. 17 in Google's listing. Item no. 1 in the listing is a page devoted to Beethoven's songs. I never knew that Beethoven had composed a setting of Erlkönig, I was only familiar with the Schubert setting. So that was an interesting discovery. But the real gem came at no. 3 in the Google listing, which was to this page. It contains a truly brilliant English version of Erlkönig, not exactly a translation but an updated version of the poem in a setting that is not only hilarious but makes it all too plausible that a delirious child could literally be frightened to death by an unworldly apparition. Anyone who has seen a child cowering behind the sofa when Doctor Who comes on the television will love that link.
That page is part of a real treasure trove, the web site of an online publisher BrinDin Press, devoted to translations of poetry reproduced alongside the original. It has pages for all the European languages and also some Meso-American languages such as Mayan. I was delighted to find a big selection of translations of my favourite French poet, François Villon, including the Ballade des pendus (Ballad of the Hanged), written when Villon himself had been sentenced to be hanged after being arrested in a street brawl some time around 1462). It is a wonderful poem, but hard to read in medieval French. The translation alongside makes all the difference.
Also in the Villon section is a modernised version of the Ballade des dames du temps jadis with its famous refrain "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?" (usually translated as "But where are the snows of yesteryear") which gets rendered as "Yeah, where have all the flowers gone?"
When I've finished browsing in the Villon section I'll want to move on to Rimbaud and many others. If you don't see me here for a while you'll know that I'm somewhere deep in http://www.brindin.com.
Wednesday 16 November
Towards the end of October, Mary began paying particular attention to the weather forecasts. We have had an unusually mild autumn, and as a keen gardener Mary was wondering when the first frost would come and kill off the remaining blooms. She said, "If my hanging baskets remain in flower until November it will be a record." Unfortunately, some of the hanging baskets failed to survive that long, not because of frost but because the plants were attacked by some sort of weevil that chomped through the roots. But the big hanging basket on the corner of the house has stayed in flower not only until the end of October but a full two weeks beyond that. This photo was taken early yesterday morning, and the busy Lizzies (Impatiens, to give them their botanical name) are still going strong, even though the blooms are nothing like as dense or colourful as they were during the summer. We still haven't had a frost, but it's much colder today than it has been up to now, and this evening's forecast is for a sharp frost tonight. So I doubt whether we'll have any busy Lizzies still in flower by the weekend. But it definitely has been the mildest autumn ever, by quite a wide margin.
Monday 21 November
During the years when I worked for the national mathematical society I got used to expenses-paid trips to London about once a month, but now that I'm no longer a Trustee I have to pay my own way if I want to go to their meetings. Last Friday, Mary and I went to their annual dinner and met many old friends there. We stayed in a very modest hotel near the British Museum, and used our Senior Railcards, which gave us a big discount on the rail fare. Even so, the trip must have cost us over £250. You can't really justify that sort of expense just for a meal (well I'm sure some people would think nothing of it, but not us humble pensioners), so when we go to these affairs we like to stay on the following day and go to a show or an exhibition. This time, we went with our friends Susan and Monica to the Three Emperors exhibiton at the Royal Academy, a spectacular collection of items dating from the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, on loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing. For me, the most interesting items were the enormous pictorial scrolls illustrating in minute and intricate detail the emperors' progress on tours of inspection of their territories, a sort of 17th Century travel blog. Mary inherited from her mother a love of all things Chinese, and she was totally enthralled by everything in the exhibition.
One useful spinoff from this visit was a solution to the present problem. Mary's birthday comes just three days before Christmas, and it's always hard to think of two separate presents so close together. But she wanted the exhibition catalogue, a massive tome with detailed illustrations of all the items in the exhibition. I bought it at the gift shop on the way out, so now there's only one more present to think of (and I have an idea for that one too).
Susan and Monica belong to the Friends of the Academy. After we had toured the exhibition they took us to lunch in the Friends' Room. Then Monica drove us back to our hotel (in her obscenely large BMW SUV) to pick up our bags, and on to Kings Cross station for the train back home. Monica was furious with herself for taking a wrong turning in the complicated one-way traffic flow around Trafalgar Square, which made the journey much longer than it might have been, but Mary and I were pleased that it gave us the chance to see more of the city. It was a cold but very clear and sunny afternoon and the city was looking at its impressive best.
In fact, it has been very cold, clear and sunny for several days now. Thick frosts at night have killed off all the remaining flowers in the hanging baskets, but the days have been bright and crisp, with the pale winter sun just about creeping up above the horizon for a few hours before setting at 4 pm or thereabouts.
Wednesday 30 November
My colleague Sam is a tutor for some of the first-year students, and he has recently been interviewing them towards the end of their first term to see how they are coping with university life. I was talking to Sam in the coffee room this morning.
Sam: They seem to be enjoying your geometry course.
Me: That's good. I'm enjoying teaching them.
Sam: They seem to like you too.
Me: Oh, yes?
Sam: I think they feel quite affectionate towards you. Apparently they call you Daddy L____ [L____being my surname].
Me: [laughs] Well that's okay, so long as they don't call me Grandaddy L____.
In fact, I have found this class a pleasure to teach. It is the first year that the course has been given, so I have had to design it from scratch. This has been time-consuming, but it's an interesting subject, and I'm not surprised that the students like it. It is a biggish class, about 120 students, and I haven't got to know them personally at all. But I could tell that the course was going well, and I'm glad that my last term of teaching has been rewarding and successful. I'll hand the lecture notes on to whoever teaches the course next year, and I hope they find it equally enjoyable.
One of the advantages of teaching geometry is that it lends itself too all sorts of interesting graphics, some of which I have put on my departmental web page. While scouting around the web for geometric pictures, I came across this site. It had exactly the diagrams I was looking for (to illustrate the construction of regular dodecahedra and icosahedra), but it also has some other fascinating illustrations, such as this little animation which shows how you can get a smooth ride in a car with square wheels, provided that the road surface has the right sort of bumps.
For those interested in the technicalities, the road has to consist of sections of a catenary. (Come to think of it, many of the roads in Leeds seem to be constructed on this principle. Perhaps if our car had square wheels we would get a smoother ride.) But a simple argument shows that you can never get a smooth ride in a car with triangular wheels. The fact that the angles of the triangle are less than a right angle means that the wheels would get stuck in the ruts in the road.
