I live in a country where people tend to name their children after sport stars or famous musicians. And if they don’t, they choose a name that is popular at that very moment; for this reason most of my namesakes are in their late twenties or early thirties now. No wonder I like the Greek situation where the popularity of names doesn’t change over the years and names reflect an age-old tradition rather than the favourite actor of the child’s parents. Obviously I also like the Greek habit of celebrating namedays, which connects people with their namesakes (and they are a lot harder to forget than birthdays*).

Today is my nameday. Yay for me and all the Martins, Mortens and Martines in this world. Have a cake and a beer on me, will you? Cheers!

* I’ve found several sources on the web that claim Greeks don’t celebrate their birthdays. Obviously, in a country where people find the start of a new month a reason to wish for a ‘good month’ (no kidding!), this is not true.

When I was about nine years old, I used to read a lot about astronomy. I suppose most nine-year-olds do, especially if they’re of the sort that spend ages in the local library. Also, there was the buzz of Halley’s Comet and the first Dutchman on a space shuttle around that time, which might have helped a fair bit too. One of the stories that impressed me the most was that of Pluto. Before the planet was discovered in the 1920s, its existence had been predicted for years by the way Neptune moves and Kepler’s laws for the orbits of planets around the sun.

My current research – which, as you may or may not know, is in the field of algebraic geometry – deals with the problem of finding a point on a line. We do have a certain line and we do have five points on it, but there should be a sixth one. In fact, we know it must be there and we also know several of its properties, but we can’t point at where it is; basically it still can be anywhere. And it would be so great if we could, if only for finishing my PhD-thesis on time.
Yesterday, I was sure I had found the said point. And my, I was happy about it. Today it appeared to be nothing but a piece of dust on my telescope.