THE COUNTDOWN BEGINS!
The final draft of my dissertation is due on Tuesday, July 21, 2009.

This is in five days.

I am still weireded out that in early December, I was ready to drop out of graduate school. And now it's July and my dissertation has been accepted. Woh.

DEAR LJ GENIE,
I own a stainless steel water bottle. Filled with water, this item would not be allowed on a plane. What if it is empty?

I am asking because I plan on having only carry on luggage on an upcoming flight. I would like to take my water bottle with me on my trip. Since the flight itself only ended up costing me around $120, I do not want to pay the $25 "checked luggage" fee. I also do not want to have to forfeit my $15 [empty] water bottle at the security checkpoint.

I am hoping that someone [trustworthy] will reply, "Oh yes, I have a stainless steel water bottle and I take it with me on flights all the time. So long as it is empty going through security, you're fine!"

Please let me know!

Love,
Kate

A MATH PROBLEM
It turns out that 2²⁹ is a nine digit number, none of whose digits repeat. Since there are ten digits (0 through 9), one digit must not be present in the expansion of 2²⁹.

Question: What digit is missing?
Problem: Find a clever argument supporting your answer.

For our purposes here, we will define clever as an argument Kate calls clever. And Kate will call an argument clever provided she thinks it is clever. No further definition is available.

INTERESTING LAST WORDS
I've been reading various dissertations, mostly those of friends, in hopes to gain some aesthetic and linguistic insight. The following are actual last sentences of a few dissertations:

"The result follows." (From constantmark's dissertation)

"It seems the best place to start would be with $k=2$, as even this case is unknown."

"As a means of bringing versatility to physical suite data, the adaptation method is excellent."

"For the purposes of checking our work, we give in the table below the list of primes we found for which $L_m^{(\alpha)}(x)$ has no root modulo $p$ with $\alpha$ and $m$ as in the table from Lemma 9.7."

"So clearly the Euclidean unit ball is not determined by $I_1(K \cap u^{\perp})$ for all $u \in S^2$."

"The ultimate goal is the development and theoretical analysis of a fully adaptive algorithm on nonconvex domains, and the establishment of theoretical convergence results for the multigrid methods used to solve the resulting system of linear equations." (From my husband's dissertation)

LIKE WOAH
I got a phone call tonight after dinner from the Dean of the Graduate School. He was asking me to be an invited speaker at the graduate student teaching assistant training session this August. All graduate students at the university on TAs are required to attend a couple days of training before they are allowed to teach undergrads. I guess the Dean got my name from someone who attended my "Center for Teaching Excellence" talk last year and had great things to say about me. Like woah! Big honor, huge CV boost. Will have to see if my schedule can accommodate it.

TODAY'S EARLY EXCITEMENT
If you're in the business of publishing mathematical papers, you already know the following process: After submitting a math paper to a journal for publication, they send it off to an anonymous Referee who then reads over your result to make sure you didn't make a mathematical flub and that your writing isn't garbage and that your result is at least mildly interesting. After this process, the journal either accepts or denies your paper for publication based on the Referee's report.

Today I got my Referee's report from a paper I submitted in February which was accepted last Tuesday. Here's my favorite paragraph:

"The article is extremely clearly written and the author has managed to provide ample background denitions and history in a comparatively short space. The proof is reasonably interesting and well conceived. The result is certainly publishable, and will be of interest to researchers in the broad area (including those interested in group varieties, semigroup varieties as well as model theorists), and is readable for interested readers outside of the area."

Wooohoo!