Last Night at the Cafe

1. The English grad student who often works at the counter has let his new "cool" image slip. He's still wearing the leather coat, but the spiky hair and the stylish clothes were not in evidence last night.


2. Now that I've been identified as a working mathematician the semester is dead and I can get some work done, I was reading about Hopf Algebras. (You see, I've been meaning to read this paper on quantum groups...) I saw a guy who I first saw at the cafe over the summer, and I said hi. He asked me what I was working on, so I gave him the two-sentence introduction to a co-algebra. I'm not sure if that's what he wanted to hear. But he knows that I'm a mathematician (he's a nuclear engineer), and over the summer when he asked what I was working on, he listened to my three-minute introduction to noncommutative rings. Maybe one of these days I'll know someone who lives in this city -- at which point it will be time to move again. Maybe one of these days I'll understand how to apply co-multiplication to non-generators.


3. I saw one of my students from Fall 03. At first I didn't recognize her because she got a haircut. She came over and chatted for a minute. Why can't all my students be this pleasant and polite?