Mondays are heavy class days. The inherent total immersion does wonders for comprehension, but being tossed (in a semi-conscious Monday morning haze, mind you) from antisymmetric quantum waveforms to torque-free body-frame inertial tensors to tridiagonal vibration matrices leaves one a tad rumpled.

My students face another quiz tomorrow, presumably on geometric optics and electrical point charges, packing my office hours with bodies that were themselves jammed with questions, causing me to arrive late to a rather dense discussion on the makeup of spacetime. According to what I witnessed of the talk though, my tardiness could also be attributed to random distortions in the fabric of reality, so I suspect the department will let it slide.  


The Giants have won the World Series! My town's primary celebration methodology seems to involve shouting and pyrotechnics. I can only imagine what it's like a scant tens of miles to the west... 


As for today's villain, I default to British Fiction. I present the king of London's kingpins and one of the world's most notorious criminal masterminds, Professor Moriarty.

Any who can claim to rival the deductive powers of fiction's most intelligent and famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, to the point of being his archnemesis clearly are to be reckoned with. A master of disguise and feints-within-feints, Doyle also writes that the Professor is actually a student of mathematics who penned a thesis on the Binomiel Theorem. Whatever his upbringing, Moriarty is rotten to the core and acts as a sort of invisible mafioso in the London Underground during the series; in fact, it takes years for Holmes to recognize that there is a subtle directing force behind much of England's crime. Matching Holmes not just in wit, but strength of body as well, Professor Moriarty actually manages to ambush and kill the detective sending them both plummeting to a watery grave at the conclusion of a climatic battle at the top of a waterfall. Doyle revives Holmes (in classic comic book fashion) years later to continue the series and appease his fans.