Grad life, blogging, mathematics and Mozart

I haven’t had much time to blog this weekend. Ideas for posts came and went. News broke, and got stale. I gave them all a haughty ignore and, with single minded devotion, concentrated on my L-functions.

One of the drawbacks of being a fourth year grad student is that you need to do a lot of research quickly enough to produce a decent body of work by next winter – for the perusal of the grim committee that will go through your job application. And I am a fourth year grad math student. My research consists of proving things — by the power of thought. Which means I work when I think and I … umm … think when I walk. So when do I blog?

Yet, being a student comes with its perks. One of them is that I get student-priced tickets for concerts. So I went to the Pasadena symphony yesterday to hear an evening of music. They were playing three piano concertos by Mozart, my favourite composer.

The pianist was superb. He played beautifully. The music was pure and simple and true. It was mostly joyous, sometimes moving and deep, but without an iota of negativity. It was a bit like the best kind of mathematics.