Haunted by an Old Life.

So, beyond actually having to fend off a rather tenacious asthma attack that just keeps lurking about for the past week, I have had two further strange experiences that have hearkened back to my old days out OU. First of all, while looking for a reference book I wanted for my class yesterday, I randomly came upon a new book that was co-authored by one of my old professors named Noel Brady.

Today I went to Max Planck Institute for the first time to hear a rather impressive talk by Edward Witten, Fields Medal winner and mathematician/physicist extraordinaire. The talk was about quantization on arbitrary symplectic manifolds, which is related to things I do, but the techniques came from and were applied to rather abstract topological and geometrical problems whose notation alone just totally flummoxes me. Still, it was an interesting talk and hopefully I got something out of it.

Shortly after the talk, I grabbed a bit of coffee and discussed some questions with a new acquaintance, then wandered towards the exit where I paused over the directory to see if anyone else I knew from Berkeley happened to be at the MPI. As I stared at the wall I heard a rather familiar voice behind me and turned around to discover my old professor from OU named Ara Basmajian, who is now at CUNY. Anyway, we caught up a bit and will likely meet for lunch tomorrow. It is indeed a rather small world.