Old Friends in a New Place

This weekend my old friend and office-mate for all five years of graduate school, H, and his wife N came to visit me in Bonn. The first two years of graduate school were rather trying, so I was rather lucky to have been randomly placed in an office with someone who was generous enough to help me through any difficult times and just so happened to enjoy the same kind of math I do. Though we are in fact rather different individuals in some ways, we do have a similar sense of humor, set of scientific and cultural tastes, love of food, taste in books, schlubby style (Let's just say we pioneered the hopefully enduring Hawaiian shirt trend amongst analysts at Berkeley) and relatively unpopulated state of origin (H-ND, J-OK). However, he would remain a friend for life simply for the support he showed me during those formative years in my life and career.

(H and N in the Bakery where we had breakfast and coffee in the mornings)

Now, we are both postdocs and finally working on a project together. So, on their way to Paris for the week, H and N decided to come through Bonn. Hence, it was both a professional visit and a social call. Fortunately, we were able to resolve some questions we had about our joint project about nonlinear bound states on non-Euclidean manifolds, which hopefully means both of us will be able to cross at least one thing of our growing list of interesting and hopeful research projects eventually. It is the curse I suppose of loving something so much that you are quickly led to the realization that you actually know incredibly little about the object of your affection. And of course, the more you learn, the more you realize you do not know. Some might find frustration in the futility of it all, but I find comfort in the fact that we will never run out of questions. Not only does it make all seem right with the world, but it is also great for job security. Ha. However, projects in this business take so much time to solve, write, edit, submit, revise and finally get published that any small step of the process must be savored. Fortunately, we had two nights to enjoy our success, an old friendship, a few German beers and some traditional German cuisine. All in all, it was quite nice.

(A photo of the Rhein River, which sadly I did not get to walk them by due to some train ticket complications they hopefully resolved in Koeln. However, it is one of my favorite things about this region.)

I always think it will be strange to see old friends in Europe, as I feel somehow most friendships are formed in the context of a time and place so the location should impact the interaction. In truth, friendships are forged in that context and some will forever be trapped there, but the ones that last show great adaptability. For those friendships, however rare, oft times exploration of new places together can lead to new depths of understanding and communication. Plus, I rather enjoy being able to show people from my past life around in my new life, which consists of new surroundings, a new language, new food and really a new me by necessity. Anyway, it was a nice weekend, and I look forward to going back to work in the morning to get a lot more writing done for work, both on this project and the plethora of others I find myself obsessed with from time to time.