\nToday was the first day of classes for the spring semester at Harvard. Being an alumnus, it’s really just another day on my calendar no different from any other day. It would be, if I had another way to fill my time. But I don’t. So every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I’m in Math 235: Minimal Surfaces taught by the very famous, very smart, and mostly clear Professor S.T. Yau. This course is a continuation of the sort of things we discussed in 232: General Relativity in the fall. Using that the results of that class as a kind of practical motivation for the extended study of minimal surfaces, we’re going to dig deep into some of the manifold branches of math which is accessible to the theory of minimal surfaces. I’m especially excited to learn about Morse theory. We touched upon it (in its most palatable form, developed in the 1920s) with Taubes in a course I took on differential topology. For a midterm paper I gave an exposition on a remarkable theorem by Reeb: an compact, smooth surface which admits a smooth map with precisely two critical points is homeomorphic to a sphere. This is a pretty amazing result (unless you draw the picture; if you do, then it seems more like a historical fact, inexorable and entirely natural) and it can’t be improved upon. [Enter and exit the exotic sphere.] <\/p>\n
\nAfter class, I took my little, orange folder, that same book by Edmund Wilson which I can’t seem to finish though I try, and a shirt covered in hair clippings from the night before during which Michelle trimmed the sides and back of my head to a length three in between hands of Texas Hold’em and hopped onto the T. Public transportation is fairly magical to me. There I can harnass the patience to read in a way I cannot in any other environment. This is why, you might know, I used to go to South Station while attending high school to study.<\/p>\n
\nSouth Station is best at night, when it is cold and you can be publicly alone without being distracted. The day is too full of noise and movement. At night the people are worn out, tired. Even the pigeons stand relatively still. And the man who announces the departures and arrivals lets his guard down and plays with his voice — swelling and speeding and slowing along without obvious reason — as he lists the stops of each train.<\/p>\n
\nI had made arrangements with my sister to meet me at the Braintree stop at two to drive me home. Ever since we moved [two years ago], neither she nor my dad has been able to adjust for the extra time it now takes to get it to Braintree. Therefore, it was no surprise to me that I’d have an another five or ten minutes to myself to watch and to read. A boy, probably in junior high school, left the same car as me. He was dressed in black slacks and a light oxford, covered by his puffy Patriots jacket. He waved his Charlie Pass, the new monthly pass, at the attendant collecting the exit fare. But at the time the boy found the van his mother—I have no way of knowing that she was his mother, though there was a strong family resemblance—he broke into an exaggerated, limp victory dance. This reminded me that with few exceptions, my friends, at least my close friends, are at the same time very young and very old.<\/p>\n
\nIt’s hard to know which they are first, and which they put on second. Or even if any is primarily one and then the other, or if they are just simply that: both old and young. Some of them are very quick to give away one rather than the other. My friend Pete dresses old. His colors are always serious and dark. He likes old things. Fine wines, aged liquors, and cigars. Actually, Pete might be very old except in age. Okay, Pete is a bad example. But I am very glad to know that my friends are worried about their retirement funds, the order in which names appear on articles submitted to academic journals, as well as where to find good cupcakes and sledding. That they’ll go to the beach with me just before midnight to play Dash [from Disney’s Incredibles<\/em>] in the dead of January, and that they prep for their med school interviews and think that the latest issue of Spiderman<\/em> is crap. <\/p>\n \nGod bless the young and the old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today was the first day of classes for the spring semester at Harvard. Being an alumnus, it’s really just another day on my calendar no different from any other day. It would be, if I had another way to fill … Continue reading