ChapterZero

I realized that instead of one day, my Greyhound trip to Houston is going to be two days! Two days of torture.

I’ll be spending my awake time fruitfully, studying the math that I want to — since I have yet to begin studying for my quals in earnest, and will be doing that once I reach Houston. The appellation ‘math I want to study’ refers to differential geometry, differential forms, manifolds, tensors, sheaves, connections, bundles, and what not. I bought Lee’s solid treatise on Smooth Manifolds recently, and picked up some other books from the library which might make for lighter reading: Bachman’s A Geometric Approach to Differential Forms, Ramanan’s Global Calculus, and Tornehave and Madsen’s From Calculus to Cohomology; the trip should be more edifying than if I gave into temptation and instead brought fiction to read. You get two carry-ons; one of mine will be nothing but math books, those mentioned above, and the ones I’ll need to study for the quals.

Wish me progress!