Work, work, work, work...

Thursday, January 6, 2005 at 09:15PM

I’m enjoying being back at work, but I seem to be procrastinating rather badly. Instead of writing my grant application and getting through my growing pile of emails, I’m doing research.

I blame this on three things:

1. I just don’t want to deal with my emails and my grant application.

2. I’ve recently purchased two black-cover 100 page A4 spiral bound notebooks with nice blank white paper to scribble in, and cheap disposable fountain pens to scribble in them. One notepad is for writing notes on my draft book, and the other is for general scribbles and ideas. The move from A5 (my old notebooks) to A4 is astonishing for getting ideas down. A5 didn’t work for me at all well, compared to the A4 notebooks. (I will resist the obvious extrapolation that an A3, or – heaven forbid – A2 or A1 size notebook would be spectacularly good.) The ideas seem to be coming thicker and faster. I recommend both the pen and the notebook.

3. The ideas themselves, at the moment, simply fun to think about. Yesterday and today I managed to sort through some ideas for Gentzen-style sequent calculi for normal modal logics. The result is superficially like existing hypersequent calculi, but in fact it is much closer to Display Logic (as you might expect, given my background and interests), and Calculus of Structures. The ideas of today and yesterday, were getting the sequent structures right. It turns out that what you want – to represent things cleanly – is a simple linear notation for directed trees. Call me mad, but I enjoy fiddling about constructing such things.

Now I must get the paper written. Before I do that, however, I have a big pile of email – and a grant application – to wrestle with.