First Tranzfer conference meeting

Last Tuesday I got together with Oded and Seung by skype for the first time since Oded left. I think that the meeting was really productive, we definitely did more than what I was expecting. However I really believe that for this to really work we are gonna have to do a lot of reading by ourselves, and sooner or later we are going to need a Latex plugin for the messenger.

Lets see what happens next week.

Conceptual Thinking against Calculations

I was reading Yasser Seirawan's Winning Chess Combinations and there I found the following quote of Rashid Ziatdinov "Chess isn't 99% tactics; it's just that tactics take up 99% of your time!". The quote got me thinking since lately a have spent a lot of the time I dedicate to math doing calculations. I have always preferred a conceptual approach to things. In math I much prefer a conceptual proof to another one based on doing some calculations, it makes me feel that I have a better insight into the problem. In chess I normally prefer to play a logical positional game than a wild tactical one.

When I was doing my bachelor in math I spent a lot of time thinking about concepts and little doing calculations. I though that if I understood the concepts correctly then doing the calculations would be a simple mechanical exercise. I disliked ODE and statistics because they looked to my as just a bunch of tricks and formulas to solve some problems without any unifying foundation. But lately I have been spending more and more time on calculations. Now it seems to me that you obviously need to understand what you are doing, know what is the result that you want to prove and why, but that's the easy part. To actually crack the calculations required and come up with the actual proof seems to be the harder and more time consuming part.

Does this change in my point of view reflects some kind of change in my personality or it's simply that this is just the way it is and I just recently found out? Or is finding this out changing the way I see the world? In any case I just found this other chess quote by Bronstein commenting on a game of Kotov that reflects the way I see things now: "Finding the right plan is nowhere near as difficult as carrying it out by means of accurate moves"

A too trivial example to work

I have been reading the paper "Transfer of Unitary Representations" with Seung and Oded. We are reading the final section that is called a family of examples. The family is actually a family of representations for $Sp(2n,R)$. The first time we tried we were doing the case $n=2$, but we got stuck at some point, so I suggested to do the case n=1 instead for next time. I remember saying "Yeah, the case n=1 should be so simple, is $SL(2,R)$ and we know everything about it". So next time we tried that case for a couple of hours but nothing made sense.

Later that week I asked Wallach and he told me that actually $n=1$ doesn't work at all. I tried to come up with an example modifying the construction, but this example didn't satisfied the hypothesis of the paper at all.

I felt really bad with Oded and Seung about this, because it was me who insisted in doing this case first. We have moved to the case $n=2$ and hopefully today we can finish it and move to a more general case.

My very first entry

This is my very first entry of this blog. I want to use this blog as a way of communicating my ideas and thoughts about math, chess, KDE, my family and other subjects that interest me.

I plan to be very open with what I write with the hope of finding other people with similar ideas and eager to talk and discuss this subjects.