Ramblings of a Pissed Off Mathematician

I didn't know you for that long, and I so wished I had gotten to know you better, but as a fellow mathematician who worked in your field (analysis), and as someone who opened up to me beyond the professional realm, I felt an uncommon bond between us. It absolutely made me smile when you said that I should come visit the Uni of Glasgow math dept., and I was really looking foward to finally meeting you (along with Robert and his advisor Dr. Pott) in person next year in Toronto (at a harmonic analysis conference.)

I'm just still in shock and can't believe it.. I always looked up to you since I felt that you were a moral, gentle, and caring professional mathematician (who had infinitely higher potential than I do) who was able to fight your demons and win , but I never ever imagined that they would triumph in the end. I just wish I checked LJ more often so I could have read when something was wrong and said something, or been in your math dept. so I could have noticed when you didn't show up for work, and try to beg you to stay strong for just a little longer and promise you that we all, friends, family, and doctors, would help you find a way out of this, a way that YOU would be comfortable with.

It just didn't have to end this way. I just can't believe.. But if there is a god, then I know he'll understand what pain you went through and give you a well deserved spot in heaven.

Rest in peace my friend. You and your work will always be remembered.

Dr Laura Wisewell

So after 6 hours or so, I gave up :p. Conway's 'course in functional analysis' has the same problem (show that L^\infty, for various probability measures, are the only abelian Von Neumann algebras, up to isomorphsim), but refers to previous problems for hints, and so I gave up and looked at the hints. Still haven't solved it WITH the hints yet.

In other news, more fun craziness in the middle east (what the hell else is new hah). I hope Israel agrees to some prisoner exchange thing. Invading Gaza can't help things in the least bit. Oh well, off to try to get this damn problem solved, so I don't have to feel like shit tommorow (and so I can move on in my work) :).

Oh yea, I absolutely love this song. This is definately best MDB song I've heard, apart from the 'Turn Loose the Swans' version of Sear Me.

Oh while I'm here... Now I usually like 'moveon.org' (I hope Denise isn't reading this hah!) but this is kind of dumb "We need to seize this moment to make sure the media and the public know that the Republican addiction to oil money is keeping gas prices high and holding America back from the clean energy future that we desperately need."

How in sam hell is HIGH GAS PRICES holding American BACK from clean energy? High gas prices has caused a huge increase in low milage cars (albeit, mostly foreign cars, but whose fault is that? that Detroit didn't put out good low milage cars). Sooner or later, gas will run out, and high gas prices are needed for us to consume less gas. Yes, this hurts the poor much more than anyone else, but then the govt. should step in somehow to help this. Anyway, enough for tonight :). Off I go to work.

Damn thing didn't work before, so here it is:

This brought a smile to my face this morning :). Anyway back to operator theory. I hope this HW problem (proving abelian W* algebras are all isomorphic to some L^\infty) won't take me all day. Of course, I'm sure it will. But hey, how else am I to learn if I don't do the problems I guess?

Well I'll be damned, a publishing company just recently translated one of my favorite books "Hitler's Priestess" into Italian. I guess now Italians can learn about the bizzare (and completely politically irrelevant) lunatic known as Savitri Devi :).

I guess I take people like her too jokingly and lighthearted, but how can someone not be morbidly curious about a woman who makes (or rather 'made' as she died in the early 1980's) Ann Coulter look like a pinko liberal wussy :p

This is the dumbest little problem I have. It's really just second year Undergrad linear algebra, but seemed to trick me up last night. So my dog woke me up at 6:45am, took him out, fiddled online, so now I'm pissed and must solve this now :p.

T is self adjoint iff

You know, one of these days when I'm bored, I'm going to make a gigantic list of every single function space (vector spaces of functions) I've ever heard of. Considering the fact that I've seen a lot of 'regularity spaces' (in a miserably failed attempt to come up with a new Sobolev type compactness imbedding), a lot functions spaces that arise in a more banach space theory setting (for my Lp compactness research, though I couldn't even understand the definition of most of these spaces at the time, and probably still can't hah), and now a lot of Banach spaces of Analytic functions via my studying operator theory now (I guess I wouldn't count noncommutative functions spaces since they really aren't function spaces).

I find it hilarious just to think of how many dozens of dozens of spaces I can come up with. God I love analysis :).

God I love this: Hamas, the leading group in the Palestinian government, claims to be obeying a 'cease fire' while for months, have been firing dozens of homemade (qassam) rockets into Israel (usually resulting in no damage, though it somestimes does kill or wound Israelis.) Now that's one hell of an interesting cease fire.

A shell recently blows up on a Palestinian beach, killing a family of 7 civilians. Human Rights Watch and others claim it was an Israeli shell and initially Israel officially even expressed regret for the incident and stopped shelling in response. However, after an entire day long investigation (what length!), Israel now claims it could not have been an Israeli shell, despite the fact that Israel was shelling 250 meters away from the where the family was beaching, and thus in the end, there doesn't appear to be a straight story as to where this shell magically came from.

(Now why would a family attempt to enjoy a nice day on the beach while areas 250 meters away are being shelled is a little strange to me...)

Hamas declares that the 'cease fire' is no longer in effect (thus, most likely, there will be government sanctioned suicide bombers attacking Israel.)

Israel decides all of a sudden to target airstrikes at two Palestinian militants (men from Islamic Jihad). They get their targets, but kill 7 civilians, including two children, and wound nearly 30 civilians in the process.

Oh, and in the meantime, the two major political factions in Palestine, Hamas and Fatah, are busy having fun with each other (or rather engaging in constant gun battles with each other, and the occaisonal setting of the prime minister's office on fire http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/m… ) on a daily basis via a power struggle that started ever since Hamas won elections.

It just can't get better than all this.



Oh wait, it does: the Palestinian government, with the EU and USA withholding funds until Hamas actually acknowledges that there exists a country called Israel, is so bankrupt that it can't even pay most of it's own government employees.

"ruled by the supreme court that states can ban cross burning if the intent is racial intimidation"

obviously I meant CAN'T instead of can hah.

This pisses me off: "We punish people for painting a swastika on a building, and we punish people for cross burning. Some might claim that's free speech, too. I think not,"

This is said by my (well not mine anymore since I'm a NY resident, but I'm still a NJer by heart heh) senator, sen. Menendez.

This dumbass should actually look into why it was deemed illegal to burn crosses: it was very recently (http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/04/07/…) ruled by the supreme court that states can ban cross burning if the intent is racial intimidation (since according to them, this is more akin to a violent threat, given the history of the KKK, rather than anything to do with free speech). But that all cross burnings can not be considered on its face intimidation.

Anyway the point is, what the hell does the former two have to do with the latter? You punish people for cross burning because it's a clear violent threat a lot of the time. How is flag burning intimidation?

Now I'm a liberal a lot of the time, but I'm a 100% liberterian on this issue. I don't want to see this country turn into most European countries, where you can go to jail for 'offensive' speech. Granted it's different for them, since some european countries often 'flirt' with extreme right views (ie Austria with Jörg Haider, Le Pen and france, germany and the NPD, or just the anti-immigration sentiment in a lot of countries .)

But still, any weakening of free speech is a slippery slope. If the 'right wing' gets a flag burning amendment today, then possibly tommorow the 'left wing' will get some other anti-free speech tommorow, and so on...


Anyway, just was doing some browsing, and this is one HELL of a quote by Haider in dec. 1995 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/e…): "The Waffen SS was a part of the Wehrmacht (German military) and hence it deserves all the honour and respect of the army in public life."

That's pretty fucked up. It's members being forced to join or not, that's like praising the NKVD, KGB, or Stasi, especially given the reputation of most Waffen SS units. At least he didn't praise the Einsatzgruppen I guess :p.

Oh well, I have operator theory to do tommorow, and I get to read up on the Bergman and pseudo-hyperbolic metric on the unit disk, fun :). Hopefully in not too long, I will be able to read some papers on Toeplitz and Hankel operators on domains in Bergman space.