Thursday, April 20, 2017

Just finished writing

a draft of mathematics paper. I worked on it for about six months last year while revising an old draft. Suddenly some new results started appearing which were mildly interesting and seemed to clarify the earlier unpublished paper. But I could not quite work out the new results and their proofs. Then I went on a trip and did not feel like working on the stuff. But during the last month or so, some of the steps and arguments kept appearing. I would just sit in the garden, think about other things too but never wrote any thing down. I just let them soak and tried to see what would emerge. Then one day all of them seemed to fit together and it took about half a day to write the draft. It still seems to make sense. I am hoping that it is my last mathematics paper since other stuff seems to interest me more than mathematics. But I have spent nearly sixty years in mathematics. Sometimes, it seems to come without much effort whereas I used to struggle and work day and night until I more or less collapsed of exhaustion. So it goes in retirement.
May be doing research at 76 like me is not such an anamoly. One of my daughters Lalita sent me this.

No comments: