How to tag this blog

Introduction

My name is Alejandro González Nevado and I am working in the POEMA network under the direction of Markus Schweighofer in the Universität Konstanz. My research topic is on hyperbolic polynomials and the generalized Lax conjecture. I have been in the Universität Konstanz since 1st September and during this time here I have been working in settling down in the city, having all the bureaucracy with the University, the Konstanz city government, the Baden-Württemberg Land government, the German government, and the EU done and, of course, also the mathematics related to my research topic. As you can see, the list about bureaucracy is long so, for this reason, I would like to point out and mention in this blog not only the mathematics that I am doing and the research that is being developed at every time during my period under the POEMA network but also those other personal difficulties and problems that one encounters during the life and which have a big impact in what you can or cannot do and when. Hence I was a long time thinking about how to organize this blog to allow myself to do that in a more or less sorted way and it was not an easy question, as it could seem in a first approach.

How to tag mathematics

For me, those frontiers that sometimes are written within mathematics are not real nor helpful at all, they seem more a way to impart courses in the universities than an actual and correct method to think about how mathematics are and are done. In this regard, I identify myself more as someone who prefers to use the singular word mathematic, with all its Bourbakian charge of sense, than the plural one mathematics (although I must recognize that in French or Spanish it sounds better than in English). For this reason, when I was asked for my research interests to write them in my personal page of the project (in which you all can contemplate a photo of me took the same day that I presented my Master's thesis Order Structures around Evolution Algebras in my home university in Málaga under the direction of Mercedes Siles Molina) I answered with a highly general and simple but classic (not Bourbakian) Mathematics.

Explaining this choice might be complicated and too much for this first entry. I hope that, when the time passes and more posts come into this blog, I can expose better and deeper my philosophical viewpoint about the topic I am researching in: the (one united inseparably and highly infinitely interconnected) mathematic. For now, we have to acquiesce to the mysterious explanation that just asserts that I cannot at all differentiate between distinct "branches" of "mathematics". Of course, as it sounds better and is more common, I will usually write "mathematics" instead of "mathematic", but now you know what I mean.

How to tag then this blog

Thus, as a consequence of this little problem that I have just commented to you, I cannot organize the blog in branches about the mathematics that I am doing. Therefore I came to the idea of describe my research life in totally mutually exclusive sets of experiences: the "mathematical" ones and the "nonmathematical" ones. And this is how I am going to organize this blog.

In the mathematical posts I will write about the things that I am doing that are related to mathematics. Here, for example, we will find the books that I am reading, the papers I am looking at, the ideas I am finding interesting and their development during time, the questions that pop up into my mind about some mathematical structure and the articles that I am writing. So these posts will cover the main development of the project I am working in.

However, there is another very important part of the life of a Ph.D. Student that also has to be told and that we all have to keep in mind: the personal experiences. Of course, sometimes they will cross in a very obvious way, but, usually, determining how one part affects the other can be very subtle. Thus, I will try to make much clearer these relations and subtleties with all their different nuances and how they emerge and work in the thin line of interference between the "mathematical" and the "nonmathematical" worlds of my life whenever they appear and I have time to expose them in this blog.

Final remark

The explanation of the tagging process has finished... for now. Nevertheless, there are more things that we have to establish an make clear about the dynamics of this blog that we will treat in the next posts. I hope that this will not get too boring, but, as usual, settling things down in the beginnings is always a bit more technical than the rest of the work (I am always saying this, maybe too much, but because it is absolutely true). I hope that in the future you can enjoy my digressions more often. Finally, to close this post, I met today with Sebastian Debus, as he and Cordian Riener are this week in Konstanz, and he suggested to me to post here a photo of the beautiful Bodensee: unfortunately, I have no photos of the Bodensee with me right now, so I will post it another day. Meanwhile, you can enjoy a nice photo of me thinking softly about the possible connections between the generalized Lax conjecture and and the IUT of Shinichi Mochizuki while eating with my girlfriend in a Japanese restaurant of Konstanz in his honour.

See you soon!