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Reaching for the postdoc world doorknocker
- December 5th, 2007
The last postdoc carnival for 2007 is coming to town, and given my current position in my career, I thought I’d try to slowly edge into that arena as well.
A short background blurb for those who haven’t read this blog before - and for those who haven’t heard the story: I’m a mathematics PhD student from Sweden in Germany, living apart from my wife for about 2½ years now. She has a position waiting for her in Michigan, and my advisor told me to get that thesis written and go for a postdoc to stay at least on the same continent.
Hence, I currently try to finish up my thesis (progressing surprisingly well!) and land postdoc positions for fall 2008 (~25 applications out, contacts duly notified, and a LOT of job search angst).
I find myself on the career path I have been going for since I was 4 years old - there’s a story I’ve been told over and over by my family: on the way back from a children’s theater show with my aunt, I chatted in the subway with an Iraqi immigrant, who asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I proudly answered “Scientist!”.
All, significantly, that has happened since is that I now know more precisely -what- kind of scientist I want to be, and how to get there. Thus, my striving for a postdoc comes with a standard issue set of rosy-coloured glasses and a large bunch of optimism. We’ll see how much of that remains 6 months from now.
Tying in with the postdoc carnival theme, this places my theme song for that pie-in-the-sky firmly at Knocking on heaven’s door.
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Michi is a recent PhD working in homological algebra. This blog is his outlet for texts with some manner of thought put into them. Over at his LiveJournal intimate details and streams of consciousness might be found.
Not all here is mathematics. All here, though, are my personal thoughts and opinions. Please read the about page (linked above) for more details.
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Michi, can I ask you a direct question?
(ahem).
Do there exist functions over finite domains which are partial, but cannot be proven to be so? Where the question of partiality is undecidable, in other words?
You wouldn’t believe it, but it actually is relevant for a quite concrete issue I came across.
What do you mean by function? And by partiality?
I’m guessing that this is the notion of “partial function” computer science people seem to be fond of. It’s like a function, but doesn’t have a value for every element of its domain.
Anyhow, I’m pretty sure this doesn’t happen for a finite domain. In that case it’s perfectly valid to say, “does this element have an image? does this one? and this one?” until you go through the whole set.
Want your say?