etc etc etc

i'm just babbly today... don't know what's up with that...

so after two long evenings of sitting at the computer sorting through emails from the fall and a bit back into the summer my yahoo account has gone from being 86% full to just 2% full -- i'm impressed indeed!

it's interesting because every time i go back through all this stuff (every 6 months or so), most all the significant events of the past half year come up in some form or another... if i don't have individual emails about them, i've probably hit on them in my notorious mass emails... i have a tendency to stew about things on the surface, but not really think through them (as my valpo roommates would say "process things") until i have some down time to think through them again on my own... that's on thing this break has been good for.... so many things i could write about right now but won't.... it's just a really good thing to have gotten my mind jumpstarted on thinking through some things i need to come to terms with/deal with... enough said.

it's freakin 2am (central... i know the stamp at the bottom of the entry says 3, it's still on eastern) and here i am still online, and about to read 100 more pages in the ramanujan biography.

despite some flaws.
(1) "his expertise lay in combinatorics, a soft of glorified dice-throwing" (i don't like that description =P
(2) blunt phrasing that doesn't flow with the rest (e.g. "by then, certainly, he was not a happy man. happy men do not try to kill themselves.")
(3) an occasional mathematical error (this was written by a journalism professor not a mathematician)
it's on the whole a really well written story... ramanujan was a guy from south india who loved mathematics... to the point that he didn't study in any of his other classes and never could get a degree at any university in india... but he kept working away... submitted some of his results to some english mathematicians and finally one had him come to cambridge to work with him for a couple years... ramanujan, being self-taught in large part, had his own extremely unconventional way of doing things which makes his independent work hard to deal with, but was also exceedingly brilliant and came up with some really striking theorems that people are still working on proving to this day... hardy, the mathematician who sponsored his time in england, was the exact opposite... pushing for reform and rigor in mathematical proofs rather than the "my intuition says so, that's that" take that ramanujan took... complete opposites, so the story of their work together (plus the drama of WWI which was in its prime while ramanujan was actually in england) makes for a good tale. but yeah, 100 more pages to go... we'll see how far i get before it becomes imperative i get some sleep. whatever. night. =P