No, silly. I'm not going to Africa (which, ehem, is not a country) but to New York which is why I'm writing today because I will not be sitting in some Wi-Fi'd cafe cracking out words tomorrow. And I haven't written for a couple of weeks because when one is having one of many Mathematics-Dark-Night-of-the-Soul™ moments, there is nothing to say that doesn't begin and end with: {Shit. Shit. Shit.} Math joke, so close your eyes: The aforementioned set is a vector space under the standard operations.
I realize now that acquisition of knowledge is elastic. Mathematics is vast, worlds-within-worlds and all that, and one of my seminal problems is knowing what to learn and knowing what I should be able to know at this level of training. Also, many of us who do math got our start as computers and calculators: We are good at arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and gasp, even calculus. And we pride ourselves on cranking through numbers and equations and deriving The Answer. But the skills that got us that far are less important with higher level math. It is about conceptualization: One has to think. To be able to "embrace" realities that one cannot see or physically produce, e.g., R4, a vector space. And then perform operations on it as if it were in front of you. That, as you can imagine, can take some doing.
Yesterday's impending exam, with me being 2 quizzes behind and completely mystified, forced me to look at the work differently. I listened to what the professor deemed important, and it was to know the theorems and lemmas that make the foundation for the study of vector spaces, linear independences, bases, representations of bases, and so on. If, he seemed to infer, you understand the principles, then you'll see how they need to be applied to the problems. I followed his lead and approached each problem (those I could solve and those I couldn't) with the question: what is it that we are suppose to determine? And also told myself that, hey, whatever I know by Thursday, I know. I can't speed up this process.
Those 2 things seemed to have opened the door for me. I finished studying Wednesday evening before 9 pm, and spent the next day doing paperwork, housework, cooking. Anything but math. The object was to relax and to hoard my energy to focus on the evening's exam. I showered, dressed and went to campus 2 hours early. Ours, unlike Yale's, is not a beautiful campus. It has some beautiful buildings, but everything else about it is as imaginative as a new suburb. Nevertheless, I hung out in the Adanti Center, with it's vast windows and simply let my mind wander while watching 19 and 20 year olds and cars go by. Eating pasta with pesto, chillin'. As I told Cuthbert this morning the one place I didn't want to spend a lot of time in was the landing a few feet from our classroom where we students wait for the professor to unlock the door. The tension, the anxiety is palpable. So, I arrived there a few minutes early, closed my eyes and just meditated. And I took the exam, using almost every minute he gave us, enjoyed the hell out of it and call myself ready to climb the next mountain.
That's enough of that. Going to see my friends' work: Magdalena Goméz's, Dancing In My Cockroach Killers, and Fred Ho's, The Sweet Science Suite. Hot. Diggity. Ciao.
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