a goal achieved

I am in my final year of a Warwick mathematics degree. Its awesome - entirely because of non-maths related things, and the fact that this is now the FINAL year of maths. But this week I managed to achieve one of the goals I've had for a little while now. Don't worry - it has nothing to do with maths, I have no maths goals at all. Other than, you know, passing my degree..... oh and teaching maths......

Anyway.

So one of my lecturers this term is Colin Rourke. He's kind of got a reputation for being illegible, but he's now teaching knot theory which involves vast amounts of drawing. On blackboards. And... he's kind of making up the course as he goes along and has not really worked through much of it before lectures cause to him its all easy and/or trivial. Example being when he proved that the 3sphere unravels in 5space by saying -"just look at it. It's obvious!" I don't know about you but I can not see stuff in 5 dimensions. 4 hurts my head enough. But Rourke likes trying to draw 5 dimensional things on blackboards. Head explosion is  a regular event in knot theory.

Oops. I've drifted too close to maths here.

Anyway. 

The point of all this is that on Tuesday he was trying to draw something involving a markov move, a bad arc, a braid and other such rubbish that noone ever anywhere is really interested in if they are absolutely honest. He drew it. Stared at it. Rubbed out bits. Stared at it. "oh dear".

About 5 minutes later while he was still staring I started knitting. 

He ended the lecture still trying to draw that thing. I finished it with an extra inch of knitting on my new jumper.

Happy days. :)