Agghhh!!

I have working on these equation all morning and I have reached a point where 90% percent of the mathematics makes sense, but there's this annoying 10% of the math that doesn't. Many times the issue is small enough to ignore and you figure it out after you come up with you solutions, but these issues are bothering me and it will take a significant amount of mathematics and programming to test my results so I would very much like to be on the correct path. I have emailed my adviser and requested an emergency meeting; I would at least like to have something I can work on productively over the weekend.

We had colloquium this morning. The speaker was definitely old-school; no powerpoint or latex presentation....just the projector. Once a statistician get's to a certain point in their career and has established a name for themselves, there are somethings you can get away with that an graduate student just couldn't. For instance, the speaker's presentation was completely handwritten, he openly admitted not really knowing any real application to the work (though he did mention some insurance problem at the beginning of the talk), and that the one simulations he did might not be correct. A perfect example of a theoretical statistician in the ever increasing applied statistician world.

I didn't understand anything he said other than the first slide. He started of by stating mathematically an insurance problem of ensuring you have enough money in the bank to pay for any insurance claims that might occur with a certain level of confidence. The rest of the talk was about manifold, laplace transform, convolutions, and other complex ideas that I haven't seen or barely remember from my days in differential equations. I don't even think he even solved the original problem. Ok, let me get back to work....after checking every news website in the world!