Hey all.

I’m Dan, and I’m a newly minted PhD in Mathematics and one of the lucky people to then get a job in academia. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to use this blog, but I have a couple ideas.

First, I think I’ll use this as a way to teach myself things that I find interesting. The one thing that I think I’ll miss most about graduate school was going to the next cubicle and cornering my friend while I explain to them what math-y things are on my mind. Usually that helps me clarify ideas and get a big picture view of the problems or questions I’m working on. Now that I’ve got a real job and am going to be working with other people that also have real jobs, this style of drive-by-mathematics is not going to work as well. So welcome to my blog future victims of drive-by-mathematics. As a forewarning, this style of mathematical assault will have it’s share of misunderstood theorems, and misapplied lemmas, and more bad mathematics than befits someone who now has three letters after their name.

The second thing I think I’ll be using this blog for is just to make promises of things I’m going to do. They may be promises about research goals, pedagogical goals, or professional goals, hopefully these promises made to the ether/internet-hive-mind will fare better than those I just keep to myself.

Keep an eye out in the next few weeks for a series of posts on the GNS construction from -algebras. I am not an analyst, so this’ll be fun.

Consider this my first promise.