Seminar

We did not write summaries of seminars for several days.

There was a talk about swapping to a good Shimura variety to do computations. It was not clear to us what the idea of the proof was. Have we talked about this already?

Then there was a talk about Eisenstein series and cohomology. We could feel that the way to compactify the Hermitian symmetric domain was right, as it put in all the smaller spaces from cuspidal support of various Eisenstein series.

Then there was a talk where cyclic tensors played a role. We remember only this most accessible part.

Right afterwards there was a talk on a conjecture which bears a semblance to the BSD conjecture at rank 2.

Then there was talk that we failed to follow until at the last five minutes when the speaker wrote down an equation between certain class and the complicated formula from another speaker's talk. The machinery was indeed heavy.

Right afterwards there was a talk on using p-adic L-function to study the p-part of the Selmer group attached to elliptic curves. The speaker shot his ideas to us like a machine-gun and we did not even have time to ask questions. We were all dumb-founded. We had a feeling that if we really set our hand on the problem, we could generalise it to higher dimensional case.

Everyday we had afternoon tea. Sometimes we had big dinners together, but we were not able to contribute to joyful conversations. Whenever the topic turned to that about our life, we had but misery to share. Thus it was not fun talking to us.

Overhead the stars shone brightly in familiar formations, while on Earth so much had changed.