Being A Humanities Major Who’s Friends With Stem Majors Is So Funny Because You’ll Ask Your Friends

uhh probably the worst math feeling is when you're so excited about proving something and you talk about it to someone who does math with you and they say oh but it's trivial

don't forget about "you're gaslighting me" whenever you do something that they don't like. this is the slang word that I probably find the most annoying recently, I've never seen it used correctly. it's always the situation when someone does something under the influence of emotions and when confronted they say that it's gasligthing lmao shut up

Bustle

Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?

Boundaries are important. But our relationships require a touch more compassion than some online blueprints offer.

brb gonna go on a spiral thinking abt this all weekend (bc i think its insanely true)

Complex Number Grapher

https://jutanium.github.io/ComplexNumberGrapher/

This grapher is really fun to play around with! 

A normal function takes in a number, x, and outputs another number, y. But a complex function takes in a complex point on a plane (a+bi) and outputs another complex point. Without 4 dimensions, it would be impossible to graph a complex function :(

The creator of this project instead uses complex domain coloring which they explain much better than I have here so you should 100% go and check it out!

Look at this cool function I got:

f(z)=(sin(z^3))^((cos(z))/2)

Shortest math paper ever.

And with so much impact! It just disproved a widely accepted theorem from the year 1769 in 5 rows!!!

I'll never publish anything even remotely badass like this! But I want it so much!!!

i'm conducting an experiment on how to study the theory effectively

there are i guess two main ways:

(1) read and take notes simultaneously

(2) read first, then take notes

so for the first one, there is the risk of going passive with the note-taking, writing down the symbols without focusing on their meaning. for the second one there is the risk of zoning out and just reading the symbols, again, losing their meaning

the problem seems to be that the processing of sheer symbols and processing their meanings might be disjoint and their natural tendency seems to be so

from my recent actions i noticed that (1) doesn't work for me as effectively as (2)

it might be that when i don't plan to write something down right away, i am more inclined to remember these things short-term as "i won't be able to check it later so remember it now in order to understand what comes next", and when i'm taking notes simultaneously it's "i have it written down anyway so i can take a peek anytime"

so now i'm testing the strategy of

read → try to understand the idea and memorize the elements → why all the elements are important → understand the construction in more detail and write it down

this is how i imagine my mind working:

it means that at first i start to remember the elements as points of its own but simultaneously my brain builds its idea on how they interact and then i notice the inner structure of how the elements are connected with each other in less obvious ways

this idea is cool to visualize how i imagine my thinking, because it shows how learning the topic reduces possible permutations and paths. i have this problem that when i start learning something new i see so many possibilities of what can happen to the elements that i can't discern between crucial and additional stuff. in order to use the knowledge i need to provide some structure

thus the main goal of optimized learning is to take the leap from "i memorized the elements" to "i understand their structure" as fast as possible

and so the strategy (2) might be more effective as it forces the memorization of the elements first and then it is easier to provide structure for them, where i would be defining order on something that's already in my mind. whereas (1) strikes at memorization and structuring simultaneously, it is too difficult for me to see at first in which direction the topic is going, i must know the next point

in a few days i will focus on how "the point" can be defined in this and how to characterize the connections

honestly tho this is some sorta pseudo graph theory and pseudo topology and i don't believe this could be as straightforward. otherwise nobody would ever post any study tips and we would have a field of study called "learning optimazation", this would be too big to go unnoticed. i wish it was so easy to just know how brain works and be able to build such an algorithm that would optimize the desired processes lmao

i wish i was a σ-field or something

side not is, i love this kind of thinking and i love to analyze how the thinking works, especially when it can me algorithmized or structured in some ways. the moment i see something is structured or algorithmic it becomes interesting to me

Nothing but respect for this mathematician's webpage

people using a matrix as just a bunch of numbers in a grid or a way to summarize some elaborate calculation instead of a way of notating a linear transformation (or at least a set of points) feels kind of genuinely profane to me. like its one of the only times i feel like i "get" the concept of the profane. how could you do that to her

I got a proof wrong on an exam. No points. 

Then, I thought about it for fifteen minutes outside of the exam, wrote it down, nailed it. 

I showed a classmate and told him what happened. He looked frustrated. He’d clearly had this happen before, too (haven’t we all?).  He said, “Don’t you hate it when that happens?”

I almost said yes. What the h*ck!? No. No, I do not hate it when I can fathom a deeply abstracted concept in mathematics. I never hate that. I the opposite of hate that. Expecting myself to immediately understand topics like this is unrealistic. I’m proud of being able to do it at all. Who cares if I did it in the exam or within the next hour? I DID IT. It’s mine now. I can do it whenever I want. Missing points on that problem doesn’t take the knowledge out of my brain. How dare I be taught that my knowledge is useless because I didn’t have it right at that moment. It’s just as good now. 

Education is not about the arbitrary numeric number ascribed to your ability to do things quickly in an arbitrary, restricted time interval. Education is about being able to do progressively more things, to understand progressively complex things. 

Tenacity and challenging yourself far beyond your limits is a hundred times more important than getting good grades. Because, when you’re one of .4 percent of the population who possess complete knowledge on a very complex topic, nobody cares how long it took you to do it, or how well you did it the first time you tried. 

Grades don’t discover new mathematics. Mathematicians do (even the ones who failed a basic topic in mathematics because their base way of thinking was too complex). Grades don’t advance medical research. Scientists do (even the ones who had to apply for their PhD programs 3 times in a row before they got accepted). Grades don’t make science fiction into real-world technologies. Engineers do (even the ones who dropped out of school because they wanted to build things, not talk about building things). 

Knowledge is power. Skills are power. Grades are constructs. Never trade actual understanding for a semblance of understanding. 

for the sake of an updates to this, I didn't get 100% on that topology test. I got 85%, which was the third best score. I finally scored the highest possible final grade on that subject, so I'm satisfied. fuck I love algebraic topology so much and I think she loves me

oh and I scored fucking 54% on the analysis test. I think I had a mental orgasm when I found out about that lmao it felt so good. I finished the course with a grade of 4 (idk if it's universal, so 2=the lowest, failed, 5=the highest) which is the best I ever got in the analysis course

28 V 2022

topology and analysis tests are over, both went I think alright

if I don't get 100% from topo I'm going to be very frustrated, because I studied hard and acquired deep understanding of the material – so far as to be able to hold a lecture for my classmate about any topic

analysis ughhh if I get ≥40% I will be overjoyed. but that's just the specifics of this subject, you study super hard and seem to be entirely ready, you solve all of the problems in prep and then best you can do is 40%. my best score so far was 42%, so anything more than that will be my lifetime record lmao, I want this so bad. I solved two problems entirely I think, which should give 40% already, and some pieces from two more, chances are I get 50%, which would be absolutely amazing

here are some pictures from me transforming math into an art project

stokes theorem

topology

I was thinking about how annoying I find what people say to me when I tell them that I'm not happy with how I'm doing at math. their first idea is to tell me how great I am and how all I do is good enough and shit like that. it doesn't help, it just feels like I am not being taken seriously. when I barely pass anything, am I really supposed to believe that everything is actually good? it feels like they skip getting to know my situation and just tell me what they would tell anyone, automatic

when I try to calm myself down and think something that will keep me going I don't try to force myself to be happy, fuck that, not being content with one's achievements is very fine, I believe not being happy all the time is fully natural and all that positivity feels so fake

instead what seems to work is asking myself where the rational threshold of being ok with how I'm doing is. the thing is I will never be satisfied, whatever I have, I always want more. but I can set the limits in advance and that stops me from falling into self-loathing loops

although what has really changed the game for me was getting a few good grades, finally I am achieving something, anything. people tell me that I should learn to be alright without this external reliance on achievements but how am I supposed to do that when the source of my low moods is precisely getting less than I want? I don't understand why I should brainwash myself into thinking that this is actually not what I want. the trick here is to separate the goal-orientedness from the sense of self-worth. the groundbreaking realization of mine was figuring out that I believe I deserve more than I get, that's why I am unhappy. so now that I am getting what I think what I deserve I obviously feel much better

yea right in some parallel universe

All that I understand about algebraic geometry at my present stage of learning.