Thank You, /r/ProgrammerHumor, I Love You Endlessly.

in a way. over the last two years or so. mathematics has become the altar at which I pour out my private grief, and transmute it to something like solace. it does not particularly matter to me if I am ever any good at it. what matters is that the effort I apply to it is rewarded by understanding. I have no natural aptitude for it; I am climbing this hill because it was the steepest and least hospitable to me. there is less agony in the gentler slope, but less valor

[ID: a figure in a textbook that has curved arrows to look like vectors in a field. The figure caption reads, "Is this a vector field? No. It's a picture" /end]

30 VIII 2023

aight it's been a while, time for an update

recently I've been doing mostly algebraic geometry, my advisor gave me some stuff to read, so I'm working through that. the goal is to familiarize myself with hilbert schemes – the topic is advanced, so there are many prerequisites coming up when I'm trying to read the book, that's kinda annoying

we are planning for my thesis to be about a certain generalization of the hilbert scheme, so basically the question is "investigate this space" and I've been having second thoughts whether I'm up for the challenge. I'm just getting to know how all that stuff works, so it's quite overwhelming to see how much I need to learn before I can do anything on my own

nevertheless, I'm pushing through as I will have to learn all of that anyway

I am working on finishing the proof from my bsc thesis and honestly I'm kinda losing hope lmao it turns out that what I probably have to do to complete it is a massive amount of extra reading and an even bigger amount of proving lemmas. the thing is that my work is about something like a generalization of results that have been proven by two people (one of which is khovanov, yes, that khovanov) and I feel it in my balls that the case I'm working on should be treated in a similar way. now the problem is that I can barely understand what they wrote for the "easier" case and I just can't see myself doing that for the more complicated one. oh and for my case I should probably use equivariant cohomology. but all I know about it is the definition, I have never even calculated anything for that + I will do a course on it this semester so it feels futile to study it now. idk I need to talk to my former advisor about this and ask him to be honest, does he even believe that this can be done?

other than that I'm applying for a scholarship. I don't think I will get it, but it is worth trying

I moved in with my boyfriend and our cat decided that my desk is way too big for one person, so now it's our desk

uni starts in a month so I should probably spend that time doing something other than math, which I will be doing all the time once uni starts, but I struggle with coming up with things to do that are not math-related. I should complete some tasks for work, but I would also like to have a hobby

there is a number of things that I could try, for instance reading, drawing, singing, grinding metas for geoguessr (apparently I'm a gamer now), but I can't commit to any of those, my interest comes in waves

maybe I could schedule about an hour per day to do one of those things so that my brain gets used to it. it is not like I can focus on math 24/7, I need to take breaks and I have days when my motivation is zero, so I just sit at my desk and watch stupid shit on youtube. but that's the point, days like that could be spent doing something meaningful and refreshing, instead I just procrastinate math lol

eigenvalues are just the TLDR for a matrix

Just in case some of you don't know about the websites where you can get your textbooks for free

" 'They' isn't singular!" Oh yeah? Show me its multiplicative inverse matrix then.

5x5 Diamond rule, iterates 1-32

Iterates 40, 48, 56

Iterate 64

Iterate 128

This is a 2D cellular automaton generating a 3D fractal layer by layer. I coded it in Microsoft Excel - each pixel is 1 cell.

See more MSExcel fractals

just had a reflection about perfectionism. today I had an exam for which I was prepared very well, but my stupid brain happened and I didn't get the highest grade. my boyfriend was comforting me and he asked since when I want to ace everything, this question made me think

indeed, I don't want to ace everything. I am taking 4 courses this semester, one of which I don't care about enough to strive for the best grade, one of which is way too hard to aim that far, two of which I thought were achievable. and now I didn't achieve that. it feels different to set unrealistic goals and then never achieve them than to set very realistic ones and still fail, that's what I realized today

I am not a perfectionist. I used to be, years ago, and then I learned to set realistic goals. now I'm thinking, isn't perfectionism a kind of a coping mechanism? deep down you know your goals are impossible, so it's not really surprising when you fail. you are never satisfied, sure, but maybe it does feel more safe this way than to not know if you will be satisfied or disappointed. if that's the case then setting realistic goals is absolutely not the way to heal perfectionism