Aaack!

So, Shawn is starting the whole process of studying for his TIER III exam, a 2-hour oral exam in algebraic geometry. I'm studying with my officemate David. We basically need to know chapter 2 of a book by Hartshorne, as well as a paper written by Serre. However, there was some issue about which paper is the one we actually need to read, just that it was about Cech Cohomology. So, David and I in our naivety assumed it was the 8-page article entitled "Cohomology in Algebraic Geometry". Rather, we found out today that it's the 82-page article entitled "Algebraic Coherent Sheaves". Why would you need to read about cohomology in the article entitled "Cohomology"? Silly me... Oh yeah, Serre defines coherent sheaves differently than Hartshorne does, so it's not even something we already know. I almost forgot the best part--I failed to mention that this 82-page article we have to know by the end of September is written in French. Clearly, just learning the material won't be enough...we should have to translate it, too.

So, to translate for those non-math majors I may have lost out there--my workload just dramatically increased. :(