The light of the night burned bright

With no assignment due, yesterday was rather unproductive. During the morning I spent an hour or so with the handout on Jordan Canonical Forms. They kinda make sense, but we seem to be lacking the why of the matter. Dare I say that this course doesn't have enough theorems?

In the lecture Chris finally started on the material necessary to complete the last question of the test, discussing "critical points" of DE solutions and, more importantly, the types of such points. I think we're drawing near the end of Chris's part of the course. After next Friday I will probably never be taught by him again, which is a bit sad.

I dreamed about differential equations last night. While I was struggling with a solution, it turned into a gigantic spider [with, oddly enough, bumps on its legs representing critical points] and came at me from the ceiling. I leaped out of bed and woke up on the other side of the room. Panicking, me? Never.

Today I went through the solutions of assignment 5 and made a small but important discovery about regular points in the process. While my answers are mostly technically correct, there were a lot of subtleties I missed which would have made them nicer. This is both annoying and pleasing - the purely mechanical hasn't got me, and there are still interesting things to be discovered around the edges :)

Remains to do the JCF questions in the assignment, plus the two proofs at the end, and write up by Monday afternoon. I almost may as well stay up working until the rugby starts.