nostalgia

Unlike the cooler people out there, I haven’t received my pre-ordered copy (via AppleStore) of Tiger yet. Partly my own fault because I couldn’t resist the temptation to bundle up with a personalized iPod Photo! The good news is that it buys me more time to follow the housecleaning tips. First, my idea was to make a CarbonCopyClooner- image of my iBook and put it on the iMac upstairs which I rarely use these days, do a clean Tiger install on the iBook and gradually copy over the essential programs and files I need (and only those!). But reading the macdev-article, I think it is better to keep my iBook running Panther and experiment with Tiger on the redundant iMac. (Btw. unless you want to have a copy of my Mac-installation there will be hardly a point checking this blog the next couple of weeks as I intend to write down all details of the Panther/Tiger switch here.)

Last week-end I started a Paper-rescue operation, that is, to find among the multiple copies of books/papers/courses, the ones that contain all the required material to re-TeX them and unfortunately my archive is in a bad state. There is hardly a source-file left of a paper prior to 1999 when I started putting all my papers on the arXiv.

On the other hand, I do have saved most of my undergraduate courses. Most of them were still using postscript-crap like epsfig etc. so I had to convert all the graphics to PDFs (merely using Preview ) and modify the epsfig-command to includegraphics. So far, I converted all my undergraduate differential geometry courses from 1998 to this year and made them available in a uniform screen-friendly viewing format at TheLibrary/undergraduate.

There are two ways to read the changes in these courses over the years. (1) as a shift from differential geometry to more algebraic geometry and (2) as a shift towards realism wrt.the level of our undegraduate students. In 1998 I was still thinking that I could teach them an easy way into Connes non-commutative standard model but didn’t go further than the Lie group sections (maybe one day I’ll rewrite this course as a graduate course when I ever get reinterested in the Connes’ approach). In 1999 I had the illusion that it might be a good idea to introduce manifolds-by-examples coming from operads! In 2000 I gave in to the fact that most of the students which had to follow this course were applied mathematicians so perhaps it was a good idea to introduce them to dynamical systems (quod non!). The 2001 course is probably the most realistic one while still doing standard differential geometry. In 2002 I used the conifold singularity and conifold transitions (deformations and blow-ups) as motivation but it was clear that the students did have difficulties with the blow-up part as they didn’t have enough experience in algebraic geometry. So the last two years I’m giving an introduction to algebraic geometry culminating in blow-ups and some non-commutative geometry.