Kirkland wrecked me, and the Leverett team at large, tonight at IMs. David showed me how to alter my swing to get more power without using more. This came only minutes before my match, allowing little time to perfect my new technique. Even still, I’m not sure it would’ve helped much. My opponent had excellent court position and placement. I am encouraged, therefore, to take private lessons from the varsity coach once I graduate, find a job, and determine the feasibility based on time and money.

In the meantime, I took this quiz on the NOVA website about that silly E=mc^2 equation that everyone talks about. I was tricked by one of the questions.

Einstein appears to be the theme today. I met with Professor Strain to talk about possible final paper topics. After rejecting his initial offer (a proof of the previously thought impossible global solution to the vaccuum field equations by wave coordinates; they were thought — reasonably, it seems —, to diverge at inifinity.), we mulled over a casuality theorem due to Jacobi fields, or applications of PDE to mean curvature, finally arriving at the Hamiltonian formulation of GR. This is something that I really ought to understand. ADM mass, a quantity I now know and love, was originally proposed as a good definition of total mass because of its appearance by variational techniques. When explaining it, I like to use the nonlinearity of the field equations to eek out the self-interaction of gravitation. (This amounts to linearizing the theory and noting that these equations obey a linearized Bianchi identity, suggesting a conserved quantity.) I don’t know the calculus of variations, and, as a geometer, I should. And since I want to go into GR, this couldn’t make more sense.

Also, it seems, as my grandmother mentioned to me today, that Newton was an alchemist! I can’t but believe she’ll soon be concocting her own Philosopher’s Stone before long.

And mom, dad, and Janice, you can, if you want, purchase the complete DVD set of Sportsnight for me for Christmas.