Well I finally got off my butt and left the computer for a bit on Friday. I went out to Uni to discuss the papers I’ve been working on with my PhD supervisor. He thinks that the papers are ready for publication. So after a little bit of light editing they should be on their way to the physics archive and eventually (hopefully) to a print journal. I’ve had these papers on my desk in various forms for a long time and I’ll be glad to be finished with them.

Doing the research is alot of fun, but writing it up is really quite boring. We also discussed the research itself a bit and he gave me a few ideas to pursue. I have developed quite a few of my own ideas and have been scribbling away in my note books. The work is very technical and is hard to describe, even to other mathematicians. When I first started working on quantum groups the whole area seemd so opaque. Early on, my supervisor gave me a pile of notes he’d written on the subject, most of which was actually new research. To keep the size of the notes down (120 pages) he left out a lot of the working, so I spent the next 12 months filling in the details and learning the subject. When I was done he handed me a third set of notes (65 pages) describing more recent research he had done. I started working on these, checking the results and extending them.These results are now the basis of the two papers. There are many more calculations that can’t be put into the papers, but these will go into my thesis (it is currently at about 100 pages and growing in size at an alarming rate). The thesis itself is still in very rough form and will need a lot of editing, I haven’t put in all the recent results yet.

I’ve been invited to a small meeting of quantum theorists this week.They will be discussing variuos aspects of quantum computing and information. One of the fellows talking has been developing ideas in quantum computing that are closely related to research I did back in 2000, so I’ll be keen to talk to him. I never bothered to publish the research because I wasn’t happy with it and thought that the applications were too limited. Perhaps I didn’t waste that year working on what I thought was a dead end.

A beautiful light rain has started to fall. It’s a nice change from the merciless heat we’ve been having. A nice day to tuck into some books.