Oh Canada

I arrived in Banff, after some horrific travelling (I missed a connection in Denver due to a delayed flight and so didn't make it to Banff until well after 1am). Although, so far it has been completely worth it. The conference is very exciting. I actually got to see Claire Voison speak! This morning Claude Sahhah spoke and I was completely enthralled by him. He finished on the most interesting thing I have heard all week:

Theorem: Let (H,F*, Del, S) be a variation of polarised Hodge structures of weight w on A^{1}\{p1,..pr} then the Fourier Laplace transform is a variation of polarised wild Hodge structures of weight w on A^{1}\{0} which is irregular singular at infinity.

Wow. This afternoon was the free afternoon and I went with some of the postdocs and younger lecturers to go on the Banff Gondola. The views were spectacular! Then we rented historical bathing costumes (they were very amusing, but covered all manner of bad areas of ones body that reveal you do not go to the gym) and went into the hot springs. It was so paradoxical to be sitting in a hot spring semi-naked at the foot of a snowy mountain. Beautiful. (Although on the negative side it was a place where one can easily develop a cold). We then walked down to moutain back to the Banff centre... the one day where we actually earned our meal!

On Friday I fly from Calgary to Edmonton for the second conference of my stay in Canada. The talks look very exciting and I am thrilled to be asked to go.