Zero To The Power Of Anything Is Zero. Anything To The Zeroth Power Is One. So What Is Zero To The Zeroth

13 X 2022

I dedicated the weekend to meeting with people from the machine learning club, helping my friend through her analysis homework and studying category theory for one of my subjects. then I did mostly the complex analysis homework

here are some wannabe aesthetic notes

my main goal at the time was to truly understand yoneda's lemma and the main intuition I have is that sometimes we shouldn't study the category C, but thw category of all functors from C to Set

after studying for a few hours I can say that the concept became a bit more intuitive

one of the problems in my "putnam homework" was to calculate the product of all differences of distinct n-th roots of unity – or so I thought. for a few days I believed that my solution doesn't work. I ended up with a disgusting fomula interating cosines of obscure angles but the visual intuition is neat, especially for an odd n. aaand that's no surprise since it turns out I'm fucking illiterate. not distinct roots, just differences of distinct roots, so that the whole thing is symmetric and there is no distinction of n odd vs n even

anyway I finally solved it, so that's nice!

I completed 5 out of 10 problems, which was my goal, so I should stop now and do my commutative algebra homework. there is one more exercise I want to solve:

the complex polynomial P with integer coefficients is such that |P(z)| ≤ 2 ∀z∈S¹. how many non-zero coefficients can P have?

I'm almost there with it and it's really cool

ofc the opportunity to include pretty drawings in my homework couldn't be wasted

during my category theory tutorial the professor asked me to show my solution on the blackboard. I was kinda stressed because now is the first time when I have my lectures and tutorials in english and on top of that this is a grad course. that whole morning I was fighting to stay awake, after the blackboard incident I didn't have to anymore

this is what I did

this week is likely to be the hardest out of many proceeding ones, because I won't have the weekend for studying (it's my grandma's birthday) so I need to use the maximum of my time during the week and get as much done as possible. I still need to do two homeworks, and study the theory. I am trying to learn how to prioritize and plan things, this is still a huge problem for me

I found an interesting youtube channel: Justin Sung. he talks about how to study/ how to learn and I like what he says, because it just makes so much sense. it's been a while since I started suspecting that methods such as flash cards or simple note-taking don't work and his content explains very well why they indeed might not work. it's very inspiring to see a professional confirm one's intuition

I know we all have different skills and all and it's supposed to be complementary, but, people who can do math are so morbidly funny to me

I figure it must be like

Imagine being like only one of twelve people in your whole city who can read and write

And it's not just because everyone else is uneducated, most of them cannot even learn the sort of things you can learn. Or they could, in theory, but it frustrates them so much that they never make it past grade school reading tops, and they hate every second of it

And it's not a "luxury" skill, either, like your whole society needs the written word to function, and by extension, they need you. They need you for shit like reading labels and instruction manuals and writting 2 sentences letters, and they pay you handsomely for that, which is nice, but also feels absurd

You read a whole series of novels that rock your life and you can't even talk about it to your best friend because anything more complex than a picture book breaks their brain

25 XI 2022

I neglected this blog a little, a lot is going on right now

I have a lot of work and I'm barely keeping up, I was sick for two weeks because not going to school would result in even more problems, so the cold didn't want to go away. I'm fine now but the lack of sleep is still fucking with my cognitive performance and I'm in general very exhausted both physically and mentally

today I had a meeting with the dean to talk about the accommodations for adhd and asd and it went very well, he is such a nice guy. we discussed extended time on tests, getting more specific instructions from professors and just a bit of extra care so I don't get overwhelmed. we also talked about a mentor who would help me with organizing my studying and the dean said that he will find someone who would help me with progressing in my field of interest, which sounds very promising. I don't know yet what that's gonna be, maybe algebraic topology, maybe something leaning more towards algebraic geometry, we'll see

when it comes to what I'm doing right now, we did some more stuff from homological algebra (projective and injective objects, derived functors and group homology) and the topics from commutative algebra have more geometric motivations, so the course becomes more and more enjoyable. learning complex analysis is much easier than those two other courses because there is significantly less theory and even if the problems are super difficult, it doesn't require as much brain power

other than doing homework I'm trying to find some time to read Introduction to Differential Topology by Jänich, although recently time is a scarce resource. the book is great tho

I want to follow all of you!

Hey, im second semester math undergrad, do you recomend any book for calculus?

hi, unfortunately for first year analysis/calculus I used mostly the resources given by the professors, however, when I did use textbooks I really liked Walter Rudin:

as far as I know, many people recommend Apostol's book, which looks very good and if I was to choose a textbook for myself right now I would definitely try this one:

other than textbooks, if you like learning math from videos check out this channel:

YouTube

Michael Penn

Math videos covering Calculus, Differential Equations, Number Theory and more

Michael Penn is a teacher at a university and he's great at explaining theory and solutions of problems

@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!

I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.

If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.

Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)

A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.

But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!

By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.

These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.

This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.

For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.

We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.

The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!

Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.

Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.

By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.

By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!

These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.

The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.

For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.

Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.

Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.

A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.

Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.

Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.

By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.

An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.

We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!

In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.

You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.

The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.

Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.

For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.

With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.

Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.

Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!

I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.

Cheers :3

22 VIII 2022

I will have to give a talk soon, in a few days I'll be attending a student conference. I decided to prepare something about my latest interest, which is knot theory. what makes it so cool for me is that the visual representations are super important here, but on top of that there is this huge abstract theory and active research going on

I decided to talk about the Seifert surfaces. this topic allows to turn my whole presentation into an art project

other than that I'm studying euclidean geometry and unfortunately it is not as fun as I thought it'd be

my drawings are pretty, ik. but there is almost no theory

I had a thought that working through a topic with a textbook is a bit like playing a game. doing something like rings and modules, the game has a rich plot (the theory), and quests (exercises) are there to allow me to find out more about the universum. whereas euclidean geometry has almost no plot, consists almost solely of quests. it's funny cause I never played any game aside from chess and mine sweeper

commutative algebra turned out to be very interesting, to my surprise. I was afraid that it would be boring and dry, but actually it feels good, especially when the constructions are motivated by algebraic geometry

commalg and AG answer the question from the first course in abstract algebra: why the fuck am I supposed to care about prime and maximal ideals?

oh and I became the president of the machine learning club. this is an honor but I'm understandably aftaid that I won't do well enough

I'm stressed about the amount of responsibilities, that's what I wanted to run away from by having the holiday. good thing is I gathered so many study resources for this year that I probably won't have to worry about it anytime soon, or at least I hope so

the alphabet is like, there's the "a" region (abc...), for just, things, there's the "f" region (fgh..), for functions, there's the "i" region (ijk...), for indices, there's the "n" region (nm...), for integers, and the "p" region (pq...), for integers that are prime, there's the "t" region (tsr...), for time and progression and other axes that aren't the usual ones, and then there's the "u" region (uv...), for like, i guess open sets and differentiable functions and the such i guess, and then finally there's the "x" region (xyzw...) for just, variables that are more variable-y

there's also o and l but you shouldn't use those

Thinking about how when my oldest brother took Japanese classes his professor was like your pronunciation is really good 😊 but you need to watch movies that aren't about the Yakuza because you sound like a criminal

Balance