Breakfast Guy

I’ve no idea who he was, but he made for an interesting subject for several minutes*, sitting eating his breakfast with his (I think) wife. I was staying at a hotel and having breakfast, just North of Santa Barbara. The person I set out wanting to draw (very interesting face) was sitting right opposite me, at the same table as me, looking over regularly, and so it seemed a bad idea to try to sketch him. Also, he turned out to be a physicist also visiting at the KITP for a workshop, and so it could have ended up quite awkward.

It was a pretty good week at the workshop. I had a number of interesting conversations with young people trying out ideas and calculations, who’ve actually read (!) various papers of mine, and so had questions and ideas about things like entanglement entropy in non-equilibrium systems, both real and imagined… Interestingly, I learned (talking with the other breakfast guy – the one who’d later turned out to be a physicist) that the talk I missed yesterday on classification of topological insulators was rather delightful. Apparently the classification uses K-theory, which is certainly cute. I shall have to look online for the re-run, and catch up. Seems like something I should know about for general education, if nothing else…

-cvj

*About 7 or 8 minutes maybe…. I tidied up a few things later here and there, although it remains very incomplete, which is fine…