Random Ramblings ( Read more... )

About 6 months ago, I got an e-mail from Zev, now a senior at Lawrenceville (my High School).  He had finished the math courses that L'ville could offer, and was wondering what he should do for an independent study.  I recommended working through Rudin or Herstein, but he said that he'd already finished Rudin and done basic group/ring/field theory ( Read more... )

I just took a 2 hour nap and had a succession of dreams.  They all began in the same way ( Read more... )

I think I'm going to switch my focus from math to computer science.   I'll still go forward major in both math and CS -- I'm close enough to finishing the math major, and, after all, majoring in math is like having "smart" stamped on your forehead.  Still, this quarter has undoubtedly pulled a number on me.  I guess it can all boil down to one ( Read more... )

On regular academics.  That's never happened before.  I've been burned out before, but it's always been because of attempting to do way too much _extra curricular_ math to prep for competitions, or to reach some absurd goal that I've set (know the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory by the end of 12th grade, yeah... that's beyond  my limits).  But ( Read more... )

"Now I said last week that we would not do anything with the great zeta function out of respect.  I have changed my mind.  We have no respect.  Now I only have 10 minutes, so I think I will lose all of you in this lecture, but maybe that is ok ( Read more... )

So I went to talk to Schlag about my midterm.  Much to my surprise, he actually gave me points back on my midterm for the problems that I had done poor writeups for (I did not ask for these points, mind you.  I have this tendency to ask for lower grades when I deserve lower grades, and to be content with my grade when I think I should have had ( Read more... )

So on Tuesday, I walked out of my Complex Analysis midterm thinking that I had around a 65/80.  The test felt extremely easy, and the only people left in my class are extremely smart (I've actually been feeling out of my league here), so I was pretty sure that I did a bit below average, because I knew that I could have done all of the problems had ( Read more... )

FLAWLESS VICTORY ( Read more... )

So about a week after the start of the year, he gave us a 25 page set of notes that basically went over what the class was going to cover.  In reality, these were less like notes, and more like a full-blown text sans exercises.  I was impressed ( Read more... )