PART 1: The guests arrive

The "Old Rectory, England" was thoroughly British in every way. From the Lord of the Manor, the Reverand Doctor Kerry Cheerton, right down to the 'made in England' that was stamped onto the back of Lady Cheerton's silver WI badge. Situated in the isolated, yet idyllic village of 'Deptmath' (voted 4th best village in the country) it was the perfect hollow for the world's greatest mathematical minds to share their research.

To mark the beginning of another celebrated series of seminars the Reverand, as was customary for a man in his position, welcomed all the prominent members of the village to join him for a weekend of merriment before the week of intellectual nourishment. The meals were organised, the wine cellar was replenished and duly the guests arrived.

Poirot observed his surroundings as he entered the drawing room, accompanied by his associate. Smiling pleasantly, a small plump woman approached them, "Ahhh Monsieur Poirot, such an honour for you to join us here up at the Old Rectory, England. I was so pleased when I heard you were in the area."

"Madame, zee honour, eet iz all mine" responded Poirot, taking the lady's hand in his. "Let me introduce to you my associate Captain Severs," he continued gesturing towards the dashing English gentleman to his left.

"Lady Cheerton, I am delighted"

"Captain Severs, I'm so happy you could join us. Now, I don't suppose you're much acquainted with any of our illustrious guests messieurs" said Lady Cheerton as she motioned to the serving maid to bring across drinks.

"Mais non, madame." Poirot accepted a small Bailey's.

"Well," began Lady Cheerton, lowering her voice to a conspiratory whisper, "let me fill you two in." Poirot and Captain Severs glanced at each other and leaned slightly inwards to hear Lady Cheerton. "The lady... for want of a better word... standing alone by the window, is Mrs Patricia Fansmield." The two gentlemen looked towards the window and to the the woman to whom Lady Cheerton alluded. Patricia Fansmield, stood in a pair of fitted pedal pushers, a large glass of red in her left hand and a sour expression on her face. "Her husband, Professor Fansmield stands over there, with the taller gentleman, Dr Yorde and my ward, a Miss Jenni Ruth," Lady Cheerton pointed to the other side of the room at the (finite simple) group of order 3. Professor Fansfield had an authoratitive presence, despite his height and stood listening to Miss Ruth talk animatedly, dressed in a casual cream jacket and holding some folders. Miss Ruth was tall, towering over Professor Fansmield while Dr Yorde merely looked bemused and had a lost air about him.

Poirot continued to survey the room. In the centre stood a larger collection of people, and in the furthest corner, huddled away, and apparently having a heated discussion were another two gentlemen. "Zee gentlemen in zee corner" enquired Poirot, "who are they?". "The older gentleman is Professor Vector: Russian, very foreign" replied Lady Cheerton, pausing a second ro wrinkle her nose slightly and let the "very" linger in the air "and the other gentleman in Dr Gangle. I don't know much about him, he's new to the village. Nice enough," she shrugged. The two gentlemen appeared to have stopped arguing as the younger of the two swung around, revealing a Union Jack shirt and marched towards the group at the centre. Professor Vector remained in the corner, following the younger man with a hard, communist gaze. Poirot turned his attentions to the middle as Lady Cheerton continued with the descriptions "My husband, of course, the Reverand Doctor Kerry Cheerton, Lady Anne, Dr Lilac and the nephews of Professor Glasgow: Barrat and Trevelyan"

"Professor Glasgow?"
"Yes, the gentleman approaching Mrs Fansmield"

And as they observed, a rotund man ambled towards the surly woman at who remained at the window. He drank a cocktail decorated with a miniature umbrella and many kinds of fruit and he held a copy of Burden and Faires under his right arm. "That is Professor Glasgow."

"Ah, but of course. I 'av met him, in Sicily"
"Yes, he spends a great deal of time there"
"I say," said Captain Severs, "isn't he the chap who revolutionised solving a system of equations numerically? What was it again? A x equals to ..."
"B." concluded Poirot
"Yes, that's the chap"
"And rumour has it that at the coming seminars he plans to announce his ideas for A x equals to C" smiled Lady Cheerton
"No! You're kidding!" cried Captain Severs
"I'll tell you something, there's not a mathematician in this room who wouldn't kill for that research" opined Lady Cheerton.

A gong sounded, "Dinner everyone" chimed Lady Cheerton, and the guests made their way to the dining room.

Street Theatre

Today I walked into town and I enjoyed several hours watching some street theatre. There was some festival in the centre of Durham (these things always take me by surprise) and they had invited some circus acts. I saw a pair of acrobats; Jacob and Sophie and they were fantastic and there was the "amazing gareth" who juggled with a sword and a an actual chain-saw. It was really all very good.

Since returning back to my room I have not done any work but I slept for a while and am now watching my 4th episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot, "Adventure of the Italian Nobleman." I love how shows set in the 1930's are so stereotypically British. Everything is just so proper, and chats take place over tea served in china cups with matching saucers and people die just from a tumble down the stairs. The only crimes are crimes motivated by inheritence or to cover up scandals of illicit children or jewel robberies and murder is almost always conducted by poison painstakingly injected into a chocolate or the victim receiving a blow to the head with a bust. Insults like "You Brute!" and "You Swine" are banded about and whenever the murderer is revealed their accent changes from that of an upper-middle class gentleman to that of working class dialect. You've just got to love the British class system and all the traits associated with it. David Suchet is really very amusing as the pedantic, hypochanriac Poirot.

Now perhaps it is time that I exercised my own "little grey cells"... n'est pas?

A load of complaints

I think my advisor is trying to make up for the fact he hasn't been here for many many weeks by seeing me every second of the day. That doesn't really leave alot of time for productive work, nay work- yet he does not realise this. He will ask me if I've made any progress on what we talked about previously and my insides scream "No.. because I've barely left your office long enough to walk to my room and turn straight back around, let alone investigate the results of my computer code!"

I think I would like a break. I mean a proper one. Not a few hours where I don't work and just feel guilty about not working. I want at least a week. I can't wait to go home for a bit. My sleeping pattern is becoming disturbed again. I woke up late today as I fell asleep last night between 8pm and midnight and then got up to simultaneously run some tests and watch "The Bourne Ultimatum." I quite liked this film actually, even though I am not convinced I understood it- everyone looked the same to me. I also hand-washed some clothes, but just like in some awful sketch show everything white is now tinted pink. I don't even know how this could have happened as I wasn't even washing anything even remotely red! I also had to steal a washing rack under the cover of darkness to hang them on. It wasn't actually theft, more re-location of things around college. I'm also still waiting for Alan to come to tea.

So I didn't make it into the department until late and then I just had a really long coffee break, which spanned 2 hours. Then I hid from my advisor for a bit, systematically refreshing my inbox, praying he hadn't emailed me to tell me how crap I am/tell me he wants to see me, waiting until I could legitimately go home. I don't know why I do that; not let myself go home until after 6pm. Sometimes (ok, alot of the time) it's not even as if I'm doing anything other than lying with my head on the desk listening to depressing songs on YouTube, but if I stay in the department until 6pm I can somehow convince myself that the day wasn't a total write-off.

I think I might have actually been doing something today as suddenly my friend Amrita (Masters' student) came to join me and I realised it was 6.40pm . She was a bit upset as she'd just had a meeting with her advisor. We agreed that there is something very disheartening about sitting next to your professor for a few hours and having him tear apart your work. What is quite annoying is when you're both thinking about a problem and your professor is making "dum-de-dum" noises. What are motivational noises for him, are distracting noises for the student and soon all you can think about is the noise he's making.. and it has long since gone from your head what you're actually trying to do. Then he'll look up and say something along the lines of "come on, it's your work" and you just look blankly at him, while he makes a mental note (if you're unlucky it'll be verbal) that you're mentally sub-normal. Speaking of looking blank my advisor said I would have to give a talk on what I have found. Well now.. that will be short. Sometimes I think he says these threatening things just to watch me panic. One of these days it will backfire though and I'll actually have a heart-attack.

Eating habits die hard

My advisor thinks I'm an idiot. I was in his office this evening and I thought I saw something at the window (turns out it was a particularly large moth) and when he looked and couldn't see anything he said "did you see your own reflection?". Honestly, he must think I'm so stupid! I am not 1)5 years old 2)a dog and I can distinguish between my own reflection and something else. Although.. perhaps this may work to my advantage.. it is always best to keep expectations low.

I also think my advisor has been talking to the lecturer who quizzes me on my eating habits as today he presented me with a prepared lunch, which he branded a healthier "variety". That joke did win me over though. I can't work out whether he brought me food because he's worried I am slowly becoming malnourished or so that when I miss a meal staying in his office for hours at a time he doesn't feel guilty. I phoned my mum and she launched into her "well... what are you eating? You have to start eating properly? I bet you're so pale. etc" speech. In the end I only got her to stop when I promised to go to the doctor's to get tested for anaemia again. I'm probably not doing to do that though: I rarely walk into town to get food.. I find it unlikely that I will walk in to go and be told that I need a balanced diet. I already know that- I just find it tiresome to put into practice. I think I'll wait until I try and give blood again and then see if they send me away.

We had an interesting chat today (my advisor and I, not my mum and I) as to why the zeta(1) terms disappear in the depth 2 coproduct and seemingly not in the depth 3 coproduct. Today I had worked out the closed form for such terms and tried to look for relations between the MZVs, but to no avail. It threw up some very interesting questions though and a conjecturally nice idea that as large numbers get "pushed to the left" in permuations of of 3-digits numbers the coproduct of this MZV gets less "symmetric." So we lose symmetry in zeta(5,3,3) compared to zeta(3,5,3).It really is so interesting and I intend to run tests in higher depths to see what goes on. And actually zeta(3,5,3) is rather special, well, it is my favourite as it has no Double zeta term in the coproduct terms involving zeta(1). (Actually I worked out zeta(a,b,a) will never have any double zeta values in the coproduct terms involving zeta(1)).

Security man was fully clothed again tonight. Good.

The Return of the advisor

Huzaar... finally my advisor returns from the field. I presented him with everything I had done, he didn't seem too upset, so it was ok really. He gave me a few more ideas to think about. I need to try and convert my recently developed "intuition" for the calculating of the coproduct of the Multiple zeta values into some sort of picture, and then hopefully look for Knot patterns. I also need to look for collections of MZVs of higher weight that give a particularly small coproduct. I also want to learn about the Riemann-Roch Theorem. My advisor says that it is not especially relevent to what I am doing but in the paper "Double zeta Values and modular forms" [Herbert Gangl, Masanobu Kaneko, Don Zagier] the rough statement of Theorem 3 reads:

The values \zeta(od,od) of weight k satisfy at least dim S_k linearly independent relations, where S_k denotes the space of cusp forms of weight k on \Gamma_1.

Informally a cusp form is a modular form that vanishes at a cusp, and apparently one calculates the dimension of spaces of cusp forms via the Riemann-Roch theorem. So, it seems to me that the Riemann-Roch theorem is somewhat relevent. Anyway, I would like to know about it as it seems particularly fascinating. It will however require a brush up on differential forms, sections and the exterior algebra. Perhaps I ought to discuss these topics here, just to make sure I do know what is going on with them.

I managed to get up quite early this morning; the fear of being evicted scared me awake and I managed to leave without seeing anyone from the college. I am now in the departmental computer room, so I will stay here sufficiently late so as to avoid seeing anyone. Plus, they can hardly throw me out past midnight: that would be insane.

A Questionable Antipode Map

I needn't have worried about not getting a ticket for Bond, as there were only 7 of us in the entire screen. As predicted the rest of the audience were middle-aged lone-travelling men. I think one of them was mad, or at least was under the illusion he was in his own living room as whenever Sean Connery made some witticism he would cry out "oh.. classic Bond" or similar. In short we had a running commentary of this man's local opinion of the film. The cinema attendant seemed to tar us with the same brush and I'm quite convinced he would have seeled the room and released toxic nerve gas into it if he had had the option. I also think he would have been justified. So on the whole it was quite a good evening.

I went to the department on the way home and finished off my chapter on the Hopf Algebra of Iterated Integrals. I think I have made up what the antipode map is, it makes sense (to me) but I'm not sure if the Hopf Algebra is allowed to be involutive, as it is with my antipode map. I'll see what my advisor says about it. As I left the science site, though, I walked straight into a stationary truck. I was really annoyed, they shouldn't just leave trucks about in the pitch black where people can just walk into them. I could have been knocked out and died, or worse I could have been knocked unconscious and then that would have led to a really embarrassing scene when someone found me. Although god knows it wouldn't have been security that would have found me, I can only imagine what they do when they're on duty, but this evening after I returned from my prescribed long walk around Durham the college security guard was just standing only in his boxer shorts, smoking in the reception. Ok, number 1; it is illegal to smoke in that building and number 2, where were his clothes? Being repressively British I merely said hello, ignored his naked attire, and hoped he didn't think I had said hello in any other than my usual way. Although, why I worry that the unprofessionally naked security man should think I said hello in a non-usual way is ridiculous. I really hope that this isn't some sort of test the college are setting for me to see if I complain. I mean, he was breaking the law smoking. Oh, I hope they don't come and knock on my door tomorrow and evict me because I was technically complicit in a crime. I'll go to the department early to avoid them, and I will not bypass reception.

I could go to my advisor's office and wait for him to return, but I'd probably be waiting days. He did say he'd be back, first on the 10th August and then the 19th August... now..who knows? He doesn't seem to be too concerned with how my project is going. For all he knows I just used a highly erroneous antipode map!!!! Oh, he is going to be so disappointed with me when he comes back. I'll probably crack and scream "what do you want from me!!?". If I do do that I had better make it very clear that it is a rhetorical question though, as I absolutely do not need from him a list of things that he actually wanted me to do...

Overhauling my notation

As a subtle revenge plan on my advisor (who has now been missing in action for approaching 6 of the 8 weeks of my project) I am overhauling my notation, making my work impregnable to anyone other than me. Actually, I am just using the notation that I used as I went along and am just not converting it back into that used in the Goncharov paper. I personally prefer it, but then I would have to as it is my own idea behind it.

I'm waiting for LaTeX to compile. I seem to spend alot of my (work) time waiting for programs to compile. I have spent alot of time over the last couple of days talking to Ruth. I really like Ruth, she is the only thing keeping me sane here. She has so much time for people and I really admire that about her. Currently she is concerned that she is not a good enough mathematician and that she should just give up and become a nurse. We fantasised what it would be like for a while just doing a 9-5 job and being able to "switch off" when we got home. The unfortunate things about maths is that it will creep up on you even when you don't want it to; like in the middle of a film or a conversation. One thing I am sure about though, is that Ruth is a good enough mathematician not only to survive, but to do interesting things.

It's Saturday again now... my how these days just roll by. So the question arises, what shall I do tonight? Well today, I have a plan. I am going to watch a newly restored print of Sean Connery's Bond "Goldfinger." Well at least I hope to. There may be a run on tickets and I don't think I can rely on going alone to get one as I fully imagine the screen to be full of lone-travelling middle aged men. At least there won't be teenagers. I have checked the cinema timetable and the only alternative is the "Bourne Ultimatum" which starts a full 30 minutes before Bond, so hopefully when I arrive for the film there won't be any loitering children poised to make me feel bad.

Speaking of children making me feel bad, the NAGTY children had their leaving party last night. I think the college should definitely put up notices about these kind of events as I walked straight into it in my pyjamas on the hunt for Sprite. Honestly, you should have seen some of the looks I got. To combat this I didn't get Sprite but opted for an overtly labelled alcoholic drink. Ha.. I'm old enough to buy alcohol, so have fun and sit there drinking your "pop" judging me.. I can just legally block it out with mind-altering narcotics. So this group of children left.. but were replaced almost immediately by another load of them. I feel like there is some peverse American TV show casting them for my own personal nightmare.