my visit to the Mirror Maze

First of all, many thanks to Hannah, Dmitry, and Yasha for their hospitality. Thanks to them, I had a very pleasant stay, delicious soups, omelets and fried potatoes, not to mention great conversations. Walking with Yasha around Cambridge was great.

There was a somewhat surrealistic feeling on this visit too. We came to US when I was starting graduate school in mathematics and Yasha was four. So Yasha may remotely remember me taking qualifying exams and now he just took a qualifying exam and, here we are, living, if only for a few days, in the same apartment. Does it count as a mirror image? Or may be it is somewhat related to isotropy of time. (I read Dmitry's earlier post). Well, some additional transformation is involved, I guess...

Talking about the exams and past memories, here is a story I think is worth sharing. I was preparing for an exam (a final for a course). Yasha was five or six years old. I asked him to play by himself, but as every person of his age he would come to me every 10 minutes and ask something. So at some point, I said "If you keep bothering me like this I will fall through on my exam!" (I said this in Russian and "to fall through on a exam" is an idiom meaning "to fail an exam"). To my surprise my warning bought me about half an hour of a quiet time. Then Yasha appeared with a worried look on his face and asked me if I am well prepared now. I said that I am doing rather well, and he is behaving very well, but I might need a bit more time. Yasha started to leave my room with still extremely worried expression on his face.  I became concerned with his look and asked "Yasha, why are you so worried?" "Because, I don't want you to fall through the ceiling on the exam!" - exclaimed Yasha. It turned out that, first of all, he did not know the idiom, but most importantly he had recently visited a university building where a ceiling was repaired. The surface was removed and underside of the upper floor along with some infrastructure were exposed. It may have looked as an aftermath of someone falling through a ceiling! After I reassured Yasha, that no such disaster was about to happen, he became a normal happy child, bothering me every 10-15 minutes.

At our first dinner, Dmitry proposed to raise our glasses "for things we like, people we like, and problems we like". Then we had a discussion whether the "problems we like" would make sense for non-mathematicians, but because all four of us were mathematicians I don't think we were qualified to make a judgement on this. Nonetheless, in my unqualified opinion, this wish can be understood in much broader sense. Everything that we choose to do will unavoidably lead to some problems, but it is great when those are problems we like! As for the people, I definitely spent past weekend with people I like.  Best wishes to you, mirror mortals!