2009 review

2010-01-11

I´m just back from my vacation trip to the very beautiful Iceland, so the new year (in terms of work) starts a little late. I have realized that time plays very strange tricks with my memories and as I grow older things become worse. In particular, when I look back I tend to underestimate the things I have achieved in any given time period and how much I have developed as a researcher and as a person. Writing some of these things down is the best solution to keep things into perspective. So, I am starting something that I will try to make a tradition in this journal: a review of the past year.

Here we go for 2009.

• Finished four papers: 1 paper has been accepted, 2 papers are on the verge of being formally accepted, and 1 is being refereed.

• Had the opportunity to work with some great people: Henk Broer and Igor Hoveijn in Groningen, Carles Simó in Barcelona, Dmitrií Sadovskií in Dunkerque, Dominique Sugny, Pavao Mardešić, and Michèle Pelletier in Dijon.

• Organized a workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden together with Jonathan Robbins, Dmitrií Sadovskií, and Holger Waalkens.

• Attended three more workshops.

• Gave 5 talks: Utrecht, Barcelona, Luminy, Leiden, and Athens.

• Visited Barcelona twice (the first time for 3 days and the second for 2 weeks) for a collaboration with Carles Simó. Learned a lot about Taylor integration methods.

• Visited Boulogne-sur-Mer for a week for a collaboration with Dmitrií Sadovskií.

• Taught two courses.

• Refereed 3 papers.

• Applied for, but failed to get, an NWO Vidi grant. At least my proposal was judged to be «worthy of funding on the basis of its merits» (sigh!).

• Redesigned my personal website and rewrote the code that runs the website to use WSGI.

• Wrote a lot of Emacs Lisp. My favorites: code to show many TeX math commands in Emacs using the corresponding Unicode character (for example \infty shows as ∞, \ge as ≥, etc.) and a small package to interact with the Simplenote application.

• Understood the finer technical aspects of low light photography and why my G9 is absolutely not suitable for it (in short: too many megapixels, small sensor, not the widest possible aperture at ƒ/2.8).

• Visited (or re-visited) for vacation some beautiful places: Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lisbon, Switzerland (Bern, Geneve, Lausanne, Zermatt), Liechtenstein, Innsbruck, Santorini. Iceland was the most beautiful place I visited but technically this was in 2010 so it doesn´t count.

I already have some concrete plans for 2010 on the problems I want to work on, there are papers that have to be finished, and invitations to workshops that I will attend. Life goes on.