In writing my thesis, I’ve been banking on the fact that your Ph.D. thesis usually means very little. A copy goes to the University library, a copy goes to your supervisor, a copy to the department library, and a copy for yourself.

Occasionally, new graduate students will pick it up for a read, but that’s about it.

What matters is the publications that arise from the thesis and not the actual thesis.

Knowing this, I’ve been writing my thesis in the reverse order: I’ve written each chapter separately as a publication, and I had planned on jamming everything together a month before the final copy is due. In this way, I get to cut down on the guff that a lot of students tend to put into their theses, but that doesn’t make the final publications.

For cryin’ out loud, my Master’s thesis was about a hundred pages, but the results were printed in a 20-page article. That’s the kind of bloated inflation I don’t like to see.

It’s not difficult to write a 250 page thesis. After all, you’ve been doing the research for how-ever many years, you certainly have enough to write as much as you want. The real difficulty is writing a tight, well presented, and concise thesis.

That’s what I’ve been aiming for.

In the end, I’d expect my thesis to be about a hundred pages long (single-spaced), of which around ninety pages will make it into publication.

“I’m not wrong, am I?” I asked my supervisor, “Your thesis doesn’t really matter. Nobody’s actually going to read it, right? Nobody actually cares.”

“Your mum does!” he said.

Case, meet point.

Here we go: First day of the last term of my formal education. For ever and evaaaaar. Hurumph. It’s about time.

Sorry for the brevity of this update. Apparently, these inane one-sentence proclamations that nobody cares about is what Twitter’s for.

The Hitler meme—in which the English subtitles from the movie Downfall are replaced by culturally relevant ones—is a huge internet hit.

But I never really found them that funny until I saw this one, in which Hitler freaks out after his latest article is rejected by the journal reviewers.

I just realized: The only thing I post about nowadays is maths.

Maths maths maths maths maths.

Ugh. I’ve turned into one of those guys.

What I need is a wonderjoint.

I think it’s kinda sad once you’ve come to the realization that your life revolves around mathematics.

And even sadder once you’ve realize that you’re way too set in your ways to change anything.

Over the past few days, I’ve been slowly working towards the solution of probably the last significant problem before I finish my degree.

It’s a particularly delicate calculation which, at the moment, spans something like 20 pages of mathematics. The problem is that the last step is to verify that the calculation fits with numerical simulations.

Why is it a problem?

Well, if I’ve made a mistake somewhere within those twenty pages, it could take a long, long time to find it. In this case, the numerics would only tell me whether I’m right or wrong. It won’t offer much insight beyond that.

It’s like spending a year planning and then finally building a house of cards, with the goal of supporting some weight. Verification is particularly simple (it’ll stand or it won’t). But if your house of cards comes crashing down, it can take a long, long time to figure out the weakness in the construction.

If you’re a programmer, it’s like detecting a bug within thousands and thousands of lines of code. A programmer can usually divide and conquer (reduce the program down to its essentials, and slowly corner the bug). But that luxury doesn’t seem to be available to me.