Weekend Mountain Excursion

This weekend was tiring. On Friday, Professor Adler lectured for three hours, first recalling the schematic proof of the Kac-Rice "Meta-theorem" of incredible power and then moved on to Crofton's Formula. It isn't defined with the same kind of gravitas, but it does allow us to conjure up a random intersection of rotated manifolds and take its temperature. It's a weird course.

Then, on Saturday, Professor Etheridge lectured for three hours on... well, let's see, Diffusion Processes, Speed and Scaling in Diffusions, Hitting Times for Diffusions, Stationary Measures and Reversibility, Regular Diffusions, Summary Statistics, Genetic Models of 3 or more genes, the Poisson-Dirichlet Distribution, the Frequency Spectrum for k alleles, and the GEM distribution.

And on Sunday to "top" it off, we went for a six hour hike in the mountains.

The views were breathtaking. Cows roamed the fields, horses galloped wild along the trails, and wildflowers glinted in the sunlight.










I worked on a math problem from class on a mountaintop in the French countryside, you know, to ensure the jealousy of my indoors colleagues. Previously, I had been happy with a window looking out on the Kidder loading dock. I can never go back.

This was the view from the mountain called Le Puy de Peyre Arse. On the right side you can see another mountain called Le Puy Mary, second in height only to Peyre Arse. We climbed it today; the road ascends almost to the rim and the trail climbs right up the mountain. Peyre Arse was actually easier, just longer.

This was the view of the valley south of Le Puy de Peyre Arse. Walking up those ridges, you don't really expect the topography to dive back down again so suddenly, but then, there it is.

We hiked down the other side of the mountain and along the ridge pictured. I hadn't realized it at first, but in this region all the ridgelines are strung with trails that connect peak to peak. I can't think of anything like it in the Pacific Northwest.












And towards the end of the hike, we sat in this meadow overlooking the long run of the valley.



Be sure to click on the images for the full resolution, if you haven't been.