In which our hero once again shows his wonderful sense of tact

The flurry of posts continues... (There was stuff I meant to post last night, but I was having trouble with the inn's wireless last night.)

Well, I'm writing the story, so I called myself its 'hero'. I do wear the red robes, so perhaps protagonist would be better. :) The wording, by the way, is a minimalist nod to Candide.

I gave my seminar yesterday. There was one particular question (a relevant question) which led to one of my blurted-out comments that I was immediately thinking that I probably shouldn't have said. I first talked about his stuff directly (which had to do with taking a slightly different ansatz from mine on a problem I'm studying---which is a nonlinear PDE before I take the ansatz in question---and studying similar stuff in those types of solutions). Portions of the 'similar stuff' relate to what is known as KAM theory (which I may explain here intuitively on another occasion), which is applied at the ODE level. However, there have been recent, essentially impossible-to-understand, generalizations of KAM theory to nonlinear PDEs by a certain mathematician (who also has a wikipedia entry) who is a bigshot (a Fields medalist) known for both his brilliance and his arrogance. Anyway, my unpremeditated comment was "I don't want to read a 100 page paper by [insert mathematician here]." where the implication was there was no hope for me to understand it and that that was because there was no hope for virtually anyone else to understand (and hence for it to be applied to real problems).

Anyway, my host later told me at dinner than one of this guy's main collaborators was in the audience.

Oops.