I finally finished my dissertation!

Last September, after defending my dissertation, I breezily predicted that I would finish writing and turn it in “sometime in the next couple of months”. A year later, I’m happy and relieved to announce that I’ve finally finished the thing! My official graduation date is September 30.¹

The final version, as promised, is illustrated with drawings by my friend Jason Reed. As I wrote in the acknowledgements, “My hope is that they’ll make the pages a bit more inviting and offer some comic relief to the frustrated student. They’ve certainly done that for me.”

*so* *cute* pic.twitter.com/IAunRvW6FI

— Lindsey Kuper (@lindsey) June 22, 2015

There are things about my dissertation that I don’t like, and I’m certain that there are still some bugs and infelicities in there that I don’t know about. (If you see any, please don’t tell me about them, at least not for a while.) On the whole, though, I’m happy with it. It’s based on our previously published papers, but, notwithstanding Matt Might’s good advice, I didn’t make it a “staple job”. To provide a common framework for our earlier results, I redid the two LVar calculi and the proofs that go with them. I also updated the discussion of the LVish Haskell library to better match the current implementation. And there’s some other new material lurking in there as well. Although I have no control over what people cite, I’ll be glad if my dissertation ends up being the standard citation for LVars.²

But I’m delighted that my diss is finally done, and I can finally give my full attention to new work, as well as, I hope, the occasional side project!