Just about to submit my Thesis

[CharonY]

Congrats. Well, it depends really on who is in there, how interested they are and so on. The viva to viva variation (or the equivalent in other countries for that matter) is, as Severian pointed out, usually very high.

Now go and find a career, the fun time is over now

[DrP]

I knew a fellow who wrote a thesis in archaeology. it was 4 volumes. yuck.

In mathematics and physics the examiners would hate you for that.

 

My old supervisor told me about a 500 page chemistry thesis he had to read as an external for some guy. He flicked through it on the train and when he got to the viva he told the guy well done but then sarcastically asked him when volme two was coming out. Unfortunately the guy took him seriously and thouht the prof was suggesting he followed up his thesis with a post doc on the same subject untill it was explained to him that he was joking.

 

 

Well done ajb.

[DJBruce]

Congratulations ajb. By the why, what was your thesis on?

[ajb]

Congratulations ajb. By the why, what was your thesis on?

 

The title is "Geometric objects on natural bundles and supermanifolds". The title is probably a little misleading. What I investigated was a generalisation of the Lie derivative along a vector field to multivector fields. As far as I know, this generalised Lie derivative goes back to Tulczyjew (1974), but has not received much attention. The formulation I used requires the theory of supermanifolds. I build some straight forward machinery, probability not new but I could not find clear references on this.

 

 

In particular I define the notion of a generalised symmetry of a differential form as a multivector field whose Lie derivative annihilates the said differential form. I go on to show that just about all the ideas of Poincare integral invariants hold.

 

I then discuss higher brackets on supermanifolds. That is Poisson-like brackets but not with necessarily two arguments. I add to the known theory of higher Poisson structures and homotopy symplectic structures. Finally, I show that Lie algebroids can be understood as double vector bundle morphisms in the category of graded manifolds. I used this to generalise the Tulczyjew triple to Lie algebroids.

 

The reformulation of Lie algebroids has since allowed me to generalise the notion of triangular Lie bialgebroirds, by defining higher Poisson (and Schouten) structures on them. See http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/abs/0910.1243

[jimmydasaint]

Congratulations ajb. You deserve the PhD. Some of your answers to my rather simple-minded questions have been highly impressive and admirable. Best wishes for the Christmas season and a one-hour viva demonstrates your superb talent. Enjoy the next few months.

[Santosh]

Congratulations Ajb. Wish you all the best for a great career ahead.