Happy New Year!

Up to 2009 already? And still no one has figured out what to call this decade. Still one more year to work it out I suppose.

In the meantime, I had a great time visiting D.C. for the joint math meetings. This year I went to a number of screening interviews, including my first for industry and government positions. I also got to meet some old friends at the Claremont Colleges profs, students and alums get-together, as well as catch up with a recent Duke Ph.D.

It's meetings like that where I realize how many people I have met and become friends with over the course of my life. I'm not the kind of guy who stays in constant touch with old friends--I have more of a hit or miss approach as I wander into range of those I know. But that wandering happens more and more frequently as I meet more people in different parts of the country and the world. It just seems weird to me because it's not something that I set out to do in my life. Like the best things, it just kind of grows organically into its own strange pattern.

The new semester has started, and with it some new faces in my graduate course in measure theoretic stochastic processes. So as this is my first post of 2009, I'll start with a toast: To new friends and old, may our paths always intersect!