I had to go to a Symphony performance for my music class at school. I went with a girl that I met at the math conference who said she liked the symphony. I was looking forward to the performance because I figured i’d get a chance to enjoy some good music, but at the back of my mind I figured i’d probably become really bored about 10 minutes into it because the music just wouldn’t hold my attention. I was right. The first piece was pretty cool because it had a sort of creepy sound to it, like something from a horror movie. The rest of the time was just boring music that didn’t seem to go anywhere or do anything. There was a cello concerto, and I could tell that the soloist was good but I didn’t really have any interest in the music he was playing. I found myself ‘playing over’ the various things I have experienced in the past couple of days, and then realizing ‘oh yeah i’m supposed to be listening to this thing’. That went on for a while and then I remembered that while Anneliese was studying for the math GRE she pondered about L’Hopital’s Rule and how it could be proved. My intuition told me it had something to do with a taylor series, while hers told her it had to do with local linearity.
I was thinking more about the rule and trying to remember exactly what it was, when I came up with what I thought was a pretty cool way that you could prove the theorem to be true. It turns out the alley of proof I was pursuing would have worked if I had been clever enough to think to use the Mean Value theorem. Unfortunately, I was not so clever. I spent a while thinking about and trying to prove the theorem my way before I realized I had missed half the final piece.
I guess symphony music just isn’t my thing. Oh well.