10/29/2016

My reference letters are all finally uploaded, and I've been working on cover letters all day. Things are starting to feel very real. I am feeling quite nervous about this whole thing, but maybe I will feel better once I submit my first application.

In other news, I presented twice at UNT this week. Both times I talked about Jonsson cardinals from the ZFC perspective. It was an interesting experience catering similar information to different audiences: the graduate logic group and the algebra seminar. The talk for the graduate logic group seemed to go quite well, and I must thank Christopher Lambie-Hanson for his excellent presentation of this material during the UCI summer school, as my talk was based very strongly this material. For the algebra seminar I tried to to use the topic to motivate some basic objects of set theory from algebraic concerns. I didn't get through all of the material I wanted to (in retrospect I was overambitious), and I initially felt it had not gone so well. A little after the talk, however, the organizer of the algebra seminar approached me and said she had enjoyed the talk and even reassured me about that style of presentation for job talks. She was almost certainly being too nice, but ti made me feel better regardless. In any case, it seemed to go better than when I presented to them about Whitehead's problem years ago. I still haven't quite figured out a quick way of presenting ordinals and cardinals which preserves enough information to be worth it.