Notebooks redux

I am in a country thousands of miles away from home -- the annual migration to the land of my ancestors. (As a guy I was chatting with last week said, "You guys are like wildebeests or something!") I forgot my research notebook.

My spouse said, "That's a Freudian slip if I ever saw one."


I did remember my personal journal, and it's been co-opted now for mathematical purposes. This is one reason I know that I'm still in the right field: I can't stop the mathematical itch. Can't stop! Maybe I get tired out by "parenting" students, maybe I get tired out by committees, but I can't stop wanting to know how this combination of group actions acts on my geometric object of choice. I got a nice couple hours in on the plane and have some cool ideas. I can't wait to find out if my crazy insight is correct. There's a nice and clear combinatorial correspondence between the things I'm looking at but I don't know if the geometry will hold up.


Now if I ever get famous enough to have a biographer write my biography they'll read all my grousing about all my neurotic thoughts... combined with math.

The difficulty, though, is that I'm with the family. There is going to be a whirlwind of social activity, from yardwork to running to coffee-drinking. I need a vacation, Lord knows, but I also want to find the answer to my question. How will I find some time? Do I need to beg off with jet-lag induced need for alone time?

Also started reading "Quiet," a book about introversion, which may be lending me some insight into why my last year at a liberal arts college stressing student interaction was, well, rather stressful. Maybe with such information I could do better in the future.

Notebooks

I keep a research notebook. The following issues have come up in conversation with other mathematicians.


To scratch or not to scratch: Do you include your scratch work in the notebook? Some people include everything in research notebooks, but I feel this might dilute their usefulness. I don't include most scratch work. It takes up a lot of paper. I include some done when I'm in a location in which I don't have access to real scratch paper (by that I mean paper that's already been printed on or used on one side). I try to include summaries of my calculations done on scratch paper. Sometimes, the details of the calculation are useful.


Paper thickness: Paper must be sturdy enough that ink does not bleed through.


Hardcover or softcover?: I used to prefer a cardboard cover but I've switched to a lighter notebook. The new kind fits better in my lap than the old kind. I don't like a terribly floppy cover, but I've decided I do not need a very rigid cover.


Wire bound or other?: I really hate spiral-bound notebooks, actually -- the wire spiral always gets caught in my bag and pulls out. I know other researchers who insist on spiral-bound.


What's in there, anyway?: Notes. Research notes -- things I am trying to prove, random ideas I had, snippets from talks with other people. Reading notes on things I'd like to know more about. Every now and then a grocery list or other to-do item. Details of some, not all, calculations. QUESTIONS I need to answer.

I refer back to them every now and then: they're useful when talking to others about old mathematical conversations I've written down, when figuring out what I did last summer or last week, when someone asks, "Did you check (blah)?" I store up some ideas for future work as well.

I don't have a very systematic way of going back over them, though, and I wish I did have a way of doing so usefully. I haven't figured out what's useful yet.