ChapterZero

I haven’t been writing much here lately. Mostly because I’ve been busy juggling four courses, TAing, and finding an advisor. I’ve decided to drop at least one of the math courses– combinatorics– there just aren’t enough hours in a week for me to handle the material in there: the first lecture covered the Erdos-Stone theorem… enough said. I’m also considering merely auditing topology, the other math course.

That decision partially hinges on the meeting I have tomorrow morning with Joel Tropp, the latest professor in our department. This is his first term here, so I want an idea of what he has planned for his future research directions, and whether he’s taking grad students. Going from his statement of research goals in his CV, we’re almost a perfect match– I too am interested problems which have a geometrical, harmonic analysis, or probabilistic aspect, or all three at once. Perusing his publications has only reinforced this impression: his spikes and sines paper, the one on the conditioning of random subdictionaries, and the one on the random paving property for uniformed bounded matrices seem like the type of combination linear algebra/probability that I’d enjoy doing, his thesis is intriguing enough that I want to read it in its entirety, and his paper on constructing packings in Grassmanian manifolds has an elegant geometric/analytic flavor to it.

… I talked to him. Unfortunately, he’s not taking students now, but his description of his future research directions fits so well with what I’m interested in, that I’m considering waiting for him. He said he’ll probably be taking students by the end of the year, so I need to decide whether I can wait that long to start actively researching, and what I’ll do in the meantime. Maybe I’ll just read — he didn’t want to recommend specifics, on the basis that the background material (e.g. probability in Banach spaces) is abstract enough that looking at it without a concrete application in mind is painful– but I could just bone up on my probability, functional analysis, and linear algebra.