Week 54: First Draft of the final substative chapter done

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	92,759
Words typed these week:	3,555
Words lost these week:	0
Total increase:	3,555
Days I managed to write this week:	3

There is an incredible feeling of having got to this stage. I have a thesis and what is more it written down on paper. The last chapter has been more of a big dipper ride than most. The big question was could I bring it altogether to make sense at the end. I feel I have done so, but I found as I tried to make progress that with wanting to create an argument I had first to go backwards and state things that would otherwise have been irrelevant to this thesis. It was also scary that although I had an idea I did not know that I could bring it off. What had to happen was a whole host of diversions and excursions that seemed to be going off at all sort of tangents had to be pulled together in a synthesis that made them to fall together into a whole. In the last section (apart from the concluding paragraph) I finally get to one of the big issues that has driven my thesis. It is there but I am struggling towards it. Technically I have tomorrow on my timetable to get to this point. A day under the timetable is as good as week at the moment.

This does not mean I am finished. I have a substantive first draft and means I am finally on the writing up stage. I have some major work to do on at least two chapters. The one on worship needs a theory section put on the front, intriguingly I think I am going to have to draw more on the tradition than in other chapters and it has occurred to me that this might be right. The other one is that the chapter on the tradition needs a complete rewrite with the description and theory integrated. My methodology chapter needs to be cut by half at least. There are some obvious cuts and I will need to remove some arguments I am indulging in. Then there are the Introduction and Conclusion to do. Oddly enough I began to realise some of what I needed to put into the conclusion only as I got to the final part. I need to discuss to the extent to which I think the Reformed Tradition is similar to other traditions, I am pretty cautious of generalising from it.

Another intriguing is that once again I have ended up dealing with theorists of globalisation and nationalism. This doctorate is about the small scale and the local but theorists who have been most useful through out were working on a much bigger scale.

Ever so often I want to answer the question are you postmodern with the response no I am Reformed. There are surprising reflections from one to other that it is difficult for me to tell what in my thought is there because I was raised Reformed and what has come because of my more recent engagement with thinkers who are often characterised as Postmodern through working with social theory.

Week 52 and 53: Slow but steady progress

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	89,204
Words typed these weeks:	2802
Words lost these weeks:	0
Total increase:	2802
Days I managed to write this fortnight:	6

Yes I know I should have reported last week and didn't. Apologies, I thought there were about two hundred words more to add that needed adding on the Monday and then I did not get around to doing it and the rest of the week took over. In fact I still have those notes to add. Progress has been slow, getting time to work on it has been difficult but I think I have crossed the mid chapter crisis successfully. Indeed Friday when I only added about a thousand words was the day when I did a lot of thinking about how I structured the chapter and made quite a few adjustments to what I had already written. This means that in some ways I have a structure for the rest of the chapter that should make filling the gap rather easy. The trick was to change the structure of what I wrote last week so that the next section seemed to reflect it and create a path to work through. I think I have managed the change from some fairly technical scientific understanding into creating a space where I can explore that understanding

This coming week which is hectic work wise I have to write another 3,000 words to get to the end of the chapter. There is quite a bit that I can draw on to create these words I just have to be careful how I treat it. I am beginning to realise that the question my supervisor set me half way through my thesis is actually answered by it, until I got to reviewing the structure of this chapter I felt I had missed it, but actually in the last section of the last chapter it will be there. So hard work but in all truth the end at least as far as the argument goes is in sight.

Week 51: Sorting out the changes in Mathematics

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	86,402
Words typed this week:	1985
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	1985
Days I managed to write this week:	4

This week I have been trying to sort the story of the changes in Mathematics in the twentieth century. The thing is that I basically agree with the Wikipedia article:

"The development and continual improvement of computers, at first mechanical analog machines and then digital electronic machines, allowed industry to deal with larger and larger amounts of data to facilitate mass production and distribution and communication, and new areas of mathematics were developed to deal with this: Alan Turing's computability theory; complexity theory; Claude Shannon's information theory; signal processing; data analysis; optimization and other areas of operations research. In the preceding centuries much mathematical focus was on calculus and continuous functions, but the rise of computing and communication networks led to an increasing importance of discrete concepts and the expansion of combinatorics including graph theory. The speed and data processing abilities of computers also enabled the handling of mathematical problems that were too time-consuming to deal with by pencil and paper calculations, leading to areas such as numerical analysis and symbolic computation. Some of the most important methods and algorithms of the 20th century are: the simplex algorithm, the Fast Fourier Transform, error-correcting codes, the Kalman filter from control theory and the RSA algorithm of public-key cryptography."

The problem was when I actually got to looking at the more recognised resources they seemed to think that the history of Mathematics finished at the end of the Second World War. Indeed when I went to one of the few books that covered later than that, what you tended to get immediately before is a history of largely dead white men, what you got post First World War was far more a communal history which includes ideas such as the role of computers but also group publishing of text books (Nicholas Bourbaki anyone). I wish I could clearly argue that this showed a real change the way the work was done but I am also aware of a change of author within the text and suspect this change coincides too neatly with the change of author.

I avoided the history of mathematics when I was an undergraduate, having been forced to do some work on it if only in passing as part of my thesis I am glad of it. It appears that this is one of the last areas where the history is told around the stories of individual people and history is not looked at as group endeavour where there were many players both more or less important. This actually makes the histories quite repetitive as you get bits repeated as it integrates with each player. Plus individuals tended to cross over many different areas so that you can end up switching topics rather too easily as you follow life stories of individuals. I suspect that a research group based approach might be more productive rather than dealing with just figure heads.



Oh well the next challenge is to explore the nature of currents and flows and see what the mathematics tells us about them. This will then get a basis for going back into my thesis proper and developing what is going on within the congregations.