Today I finished my relisten of A Brief History of Mathematics and also read more of Infinite Powers. The final section of A Brief History discussed algebraic geometry in very general terms, which piqued my interest. So I went and read part of the summary of that topic in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics.
That book is really cool, with outlines of both the content and history of the subject. I am pleased finally to be getting some use out of it. It was a gift from my father soon after I left college and before I realized that math was no longer something I could do. I nearly got rid of it, along with all my other math books, at numerous points over fifteen years. I always held on, though, lugging a several shelf feet of math books through two interstate moves, and I am so glad now that I still have my library to draw on. The Internet is also a good resource, but most of the time it can’t match the organization, depth, or reliability of a book.
That said, I am still feeling mentally weary and struggling with this project. I am not sure whether to keep pushing or take time away. (I hesitate to do the latter, since I don’t know what the problem is and therefore have no evidence that things would be better after a break.) Possibly the change in medication that I started today will help.
Sometimes bad juju turns into good juju.