Good news: With the weather pretty nice outside, it doesn't take long to bike over to the Institute of Advanced Studies. I took it easy on the way over, and the ride was 15 minutes from Fine Hall to Simonyi Hall. On the way back, a couple of second years were on their bikes in front of me, and I decided to be a speed demon (and my bike is in good enough shape that I can afford to) and the return trip only took 10. This means that 1) it is probably quicker for me to bike from my office to IAS then for me to walk to the parking lot, grab a car, drive over, and park and 2) it sort of makes me feel better about moving out of Lawrence apartments where the institute is but a stone's throw away.

Bad news: Some harmonic analysis things that I have been working on for the past 2 weeks just came tumbling down. In hindsight the reason the whole program failed is completely obvious, yet I did not realize its infeasibility until after an e-mail exchange with Sigmund Selberg. Since this is a non-result, maybe I'll write up what I learned on this medium a bit later tonight.

Good news: The reason why I went to the IAS was to hear Christodoulou talk about his new work about formation of black holes in general relativity. It is to be a three-part lecture series. The first part today was relatively easy: it was a summary of the main results and a quick review/description of the two main techniques used in Klainerman-Christodoulou, namely the maximal foliation technique and the construction of the vector fields method. Tomorrow he will start on the short-pulse method which lies at the heart of this new proof.