As of April 23, 2013, I have completed all requirements for the Ph.D.

Huzzah!

The new header photo shows me with my committee immediately after my defense. The defense was on April 12; after that, I had to make final corrections to my dissertation, submit an official hard copy and electronic copy, fill out some surveys and paperwork.

And now . . . I finally have time to work on this Web site, which I haven’t updated since last fall.

So, I just spent the last hour trying to figure out why I couldn’t get Synctex to work. Synctex is the part of LaTeX that allows one to do inverse search, among other things. In other words, it lets me click on text in the output pdf file and jump immediately to the corresponding LaTeX code. I had two LaTeX files for which synctex wasn’t working. When I compiled other files using the same settings, it worked fine. Finally, I figured out the problem — if the file name contains more than one word separated by spaces, synctex doesn’t work (at least in TexStudio). Well, at least I figured it out. But I wish I could have been spending that time working on my research statement instead.

This is part of why I didn’t major in computer science. I feel like I would have spent half my time searching for bugs like this. Then again, sometimes I wonder whether the problem is worse in math. Math proofs likely contain just as many bugs as computer programs, but since they are checked by fallible humans, some of these bugs are never discovered. But I take comfort in thinking that most such bugs are not major mathematical errors, but rather easily correctable oversights.