topic was "Algebraic Logic". The point is to model
constructive proof theory in lattices or algebras and prove
things about the theory using the model. There are nice
results, and beautiful mechanics, but I don't think I was
very convincing of the fact. I tried to give a motivation
for why we do this stuff at all. That inevitably turned out
to be too general and handwavy. I'd then try to give
explicit examples, but these usually didn't captivate the
notion well. Thus, I kind of floundered between the too
general and too specific. I thought Bob's presentation was
immaculate yesterday, but many students claimed today not to
have understood what he was talking about. It started going
better, I think, when we started just doing basic symbol
manipulation exercises. But that's kind of a cop-out, for
you needn't understand anything to play with symbols, though
it seems on the surface like you're doing something. I need
to plan more. On the positive side, I'm getting used to
making mistakes at the blackboard and being corrected
without losing my train of thought.
I'm listening to Karajan's
St. Matthew Passion right now.
It's a bit slow and languid in places, but damn,
some of it is just spectacular, eg. the bass arias.
An amazing picture of the sky with a "second sun". How did
that happen!?!.
My favorite photograph of all time:
No comments:
Post a Comment