Sunday, October 23, 2016

I am still remembered in mathematics

During a selfsearch I find:
"The following is a very strong theorem.
Theorem 3.6 (Swarup [Swa]). If X is a connected metrizable space which admits a uniform convergence group action, then X is locally connected and contains no cut points."
i did not see it this way. This seems to refer to a theorem in which Brian Bowditch did 90 percent of the work and I put two and two together. That was done twenty years ago.
http://www.math.univ-toulouse.fr/~phaissin/Doc/actionqmobius.pdf
I am of course more pleased with the current work with Peter Scott and Lawrence Reeves about Poincare Duality pairs where we seem to have proved that their canonical decompositions depend only on the group and not on the boundary. The earlier work took only a week and this is going on even after three and half months. Possibly harder work gives more satisfaction though it is not clear which is more significant. One of the best things that I have done took place during a train journey of two hours in 1977. I was visiting Jo in Southampton, who is still a good friend and is still in touch. The 1977 work and the current work are related.