Pirandello

The other night I went to see Six Characters in Search of an Author. It's a good play I think. To be honest, the production at the Lowry for which I had tickets failed to impress somewhat. The vast majority of the cast seemed to have come prepared for a pantomime rather than a radical existentialist romp. The story follows a family of six who were created by some author who didn't bother finishing the project. They are left in a sort of limbo of neither being seen by anyone else nor being entirely non-existent. As a result, they barge into a rehearsal for some play or other and demand that their story be told. I think it could be a very powerful drama but alas, such power was lacking from this performance. Could be an interesing thing to watch though. In other news: String theory is cool.

Conferences, Sleeping

Goodness, it has been rather a while. I've been away. This is my general excuse for everything (and it's not as if anyone reads this so I'm sure I'm not depleting some great following by neglecting to write anything). I was in Poland for a week and in Bakewell for another week. Two very different places. The Polish conference was one organised by the ESF on Algebraic Aspects in Geometry. (I was convinced that ought to have been 'of' rather than 'in', but hey, what do I know). It really was a rather strange experience - The only native English speakers were a guy from Wisconsin and me and yet all lectures were in English. The rest of the time, most people spoke either in French Russian or a small smattering of German. I suppose it helped somewhat that most of the people there seemed to be from Luxembourg presumably at the prompting of one of the organisers, Norbert Poncin. I met more than a few interesting people there though, which was great. Right now though, I have to figure out what the hell is going on with the mathematics... I thought I was doing ok, but it turns out that everything that took me a long time to figure out was already known. Boo.