12 XII 2022

I can relate to your undergrad experience! And I think it might be a good sign looking forward, because you've developed insights and ways of thinking and motivation to go beyond undergrad and seek out new spaces where you can do your own work. That's by no means common, I know many fellow undergrads who are a) as mystified when they retake a class as they were the first time round, and b) feel accomplished enough to have passed eg Introductory Analysis and have no drive to look onward. You seem to know very much what you're good at, what interests you and which areas you'd like to grow in. I'd argue that undergrad studies, which give you an introduction and overview of the field and teach basic reasoning skills while not expecting any really original problem solving aren't exactly made for people like you. Talking to your professors or Masters or even PhD students is a really good idea!

thank you for your input, it brings a huge relief!

I already talked to two of my professors and they said that there is nothing to worry about. my advisor said that in his opinion learning new concepts while working on some problem is the right way to learn and from his experience this is way more rewarding than learning for school or even "just to learn". he also said that if I'm interested in working more on open stuff then he will let me know when he finds some questions I could ponder. the other professor said that it's a good thing, because from his experience a lot of people tend to get discouraged when there is no way of knowing how long solving the problem will take or how much new theory is needed, and I seem to be the other way around, so the work I'll be doing in the future probably won't scare me as much

I talked to some of my friends who are about to finish undergrad like me, and there are people who feel the same way as I do. coincidentally, those are the people who had the same situation as mine, that is, they were lucky enough to find an advisor who gave them an open question to work on. other people I talked to seem to be fairly content with studying for the classes and completing homework assignments, and they didn't get to work on something open yet, so maybe it has something to do with getting the taste of the good stuff haha

I can see now that the future looks good and I'm motivated to go exploring. I am aware that I have so much more to learn, but having got the reassurance that I'm probably doing it right, it doesn't sound as scary anymore

Real’s Math Ask Meme

What math classes have you taken?

What math classes did you do best in?

What math classes did you like the most?

What math classes did you do worst in?

Are there areas of math that you enjoy? What are they?

Why do you learn math?

What do you like about math?

Least favorite notation you’ve ever seen?

Do you have any favorite theorems?

Better yet, do you have any least favorite theorems?

Tell me a funny math story.

Who actually invented calculus?

Do you have any stories of Mathematical failure you’d like to share?

Do you think you’re good at math? Do you expect more from yourself?

Do other people think you’re good at math?

Do you know anyone who doesn’t think they’re good at math but you look up to anyway? Do you think they are?

Are there any great female Mathematicians (living or dead) you would give a shout-out to?

Can you share a good math problem you’ve solved recently?

How did you solve it?

Can you share any problem solving tips?

Have you ever taken a competitive exam?

Do you have any friends on Tumblr that also do math?

Will P=NP? Why or why not?

Do you feel the riemann zeta function has any non-trivial zeroes off the ½ line?

Who is your favorite Mathematician?

Who is your least favorite Mathematician?

Do you know any good math jokes?

You’re at the club and Andrew Wiles proves your girl’s last theorem. WYD?

You’re at the club and Grigori Perlman brushes his gorgeous locks of hair to the side and then proves your girl’s conjecture. WYD?

Who is/was the most attractive Mathematician, living or dead? (And why is it Grigori Perlman?)

Can you share a math pickup line?

Can you share many math pickup lines?

Can you keep delivering math pickup lines until my pants dissapear?

Have you ever dated a Mathematician?

Would you date someone who dislikes math?

Would you date someone who’s better than you at math?

Have you ever used math in a novel or entertaining way?

Have you learned any math on your own recently?

When’s the last time you computed something without a calculator?

What’s the silliest Mathematical mistake you’ve ever made?

Which is better named? The Chicken McNugget theorem? Or the Hairy Ball theorem?

Is it really the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Was it the answer on an exam ever? If not, did you put it down anyway to be a wise-ass?

Did you ever fail a math class?

Is math a challenge for you?

Are you a Formalist, Logicist, or Platonist?

Are you close with a math professor?

Just how big is a big number?

Has math changed you?

What’s your favorite number system? Integers? Reals? Rationals? Hyper-reals? Surreals? Complex? Natural numbers?

How do you feel about Norman Wildberger?

Favorite casual math book?

Do you have favorite math textbooks? If so, what are they?

Do you collect anything that is math-related?

Do you have a shrine Terence Tao in your bedroom? If not, where is it?

Where is your most favorite place to do math?

Do you have a favorite sequence? Is it in the OEIS?

What inspired you to do math?

Do you have any favorite/cool math websites you’d like to share?

Can you reccomend any online resources for math?

What’s you favorite number? (Wise-ass answers allowed)

Does 6 really *deserve* to be called a perfect number? What the h*ck did it ever do?

Are there any non-interesting numbers?

How many grains of sand are in a heap of sand?

What’s something your followers don’t know that you’d be willing to share?

Have you ever tried to figure out the prime factors of your phone number?

If yes to 65, what are they? If no, will you let me figure them out for you? 😉

Do you have any math tatoos?

Do you want any math tatoos?

Wanna test my theory that symmetry makes everything more fun?

Do you like Mathematical paradoxes?

👀

Are you a fan of algorithms? If so, which are your favorite?

Can you program? What languages do you know?

guy next to me at work is french and fucking insufferable about it. "chebyshev's inequality? i'm not familiar... do you perhaps mean l'inégalité de bienaymé-tchebychev?" "snell's law? i only know of snell-descartes.." every day he emails me a list of all fields medalists from l'école normale supérieure

Weaving Stereographic Projection

I made a stereographic projection by weaving paper strips!

Here's a Julia package for the computation of the shapes of the paper strips.

GitHub

GitHub - hyrodium/ElasticSurfaceEmbedding.jl: The weaving paper strips: shape optimization by geometric elasticity

The weaving paper strips: shape optimization by geometric elasticity - GitHub - hyrodium/ElasticSurfaceEmbedding.jl: The weaving paper strip

Japanese blog post about this: https://note.com/hyrodium/n/n7b7cf03a7d91

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

meanwhile typical conversations between my friends:

– so what do you do in math?

– differential equations

– ugh I always hated differential equations

– you?

– general topology

– ugh I always hated topology

The curse of a mathematician is to work in a disliked field

10 IX 2022

today I need some extra motivation to study because I didn't sleep well these past few days and it has drastic effects on my productivity, energy, motivation and what have you

also I am struggling to make the choice as to what I should do today

yesterday I started solving some basic exercises from hatcher's textbook

Δ-complex structures are becoming more intuicitve with time. take my solutions with a grain of salt, I am just starting to learn about these things and won't vouch for them lmao

some more complicated objects (the last one is an example of a lense space)

I decided to study commutative algebra today

so far I'm enjoying it. not as much as algebraic topology (which will always be my number 1) but it has its beauty

right now I'm at hom and tensor functors, the structures are fairly complicated, but pretty, and they look like they need to be studied in stages, with repetition and breaks, to fully grasp what's going on

my sensory issues are terrible today and I'm exhausted and hyperactive at the same time uh

I'll try working through a lecture on commutative algebra and give an update on how it went later

update: I studied for a while, but it wasn't going great so I decided to take a nap instead. god knows I tried

Very funny when mathematicians call weird edge cases "pathological".

Mathematician looking at a function that's continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere: yeah that function has something wrong with it.

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