Diary – November 2019

Håkon Robbestad Gylterud

2019–11–13, Wednesday

Final lecture of my course on software security. One of the best improvements to my lectures this year has been the “muddiest point”-technique. It is simply a form which I send out after each lecture where the students can write what they though was most unclear. Then I use this as input for my next lecture.

2019–11–15, Friday

My PhD advisor, Erik Palmgren, has passed away. His tenure as professor at Stockholm University had just started1 when I became his PhD student, and since then he built a strong group working in constructive mathematics, logic and type theory. His early passing will be regretted by many people in our academic community.

Erik was a careful and caring person, who would extended his duties as an advisor beyond the mathematics. He was there for us when we, inevitably, got ourselves into trouble, and I treasure all the conversations we had.

2019–11–17, Sunday

Experimenting with sourdough for pizza. While the dough is rising I am working on an article about non-wellfounded sets.

2019–11–19, Tuesday

Still working on the article about non-wellfounded sets, but had a flash of understanding today, which I hope will make the structure of the article clearer and the proofs much more manageable. The insight was, in short, remembering that a certain subtype I was defining was in fact also a quotient.

2019–11–22, Friday

In Stockholm to participate in a memorial ceremony for Erik at the mathematical institute. Good to see so many collegues and friends there. Per, Peter, Christian and I each said a few words, and people from all over the world had sent messages which were read aloud. Douglas Bridges had recorded a message, which we played.

2019–11–25, Monday

Spent some time fixing administrative things today and fixing typographic stuff in my article.


  1. Although he had been professor at Uppsala University before that


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