Bsdndprplplld - You Can't Comb A Hairy Ball

2 IV 2023

oh god the programming task for today was so annoying. I was supposed to process the MIT database with ECG records, and the annotation part of it was hell. after three hours I finally did it but the anger I felt at that time put me seconds away from throwing my laptop out of the window lmao

a recent success is that I calculated the rank of the module that I am working with, the problem is almost solved! when I told my advisor about it he looked so happy, he said that maybe he should start looking for another problem for me to ponder, it was so satisfying. I have a thing for mentors. at each point in my life for which I had a mentor who would teach me my special interest the progress I was making improved significantly and those were always the happiest times of my life. I am not sure if my advisor will stay with me to further show me a way into the research, but it certainly feels like a possibility

today I did some algebraic topology and differential geometry, I'm trying not to fall behind with the material even when I don't feel like studying

next week the easter starts, so I will probably have to visit my family. it's an interesting feeling to see my sister all grown up, there is still the image in my head of when she was barely a teenager and we didn't have much to talk about. now she is almost 18 and the significance of the age difference is nearly gone. when she start university it will be even less noticeable as she will understand what I mean by "fuck my life it's exam session season" lol

for about a week I've been trying to eat more healthy food, it's going fine so far. my biggest problem is that I'm eating way too much sugar but undereating in the general sense at the same time. I'm trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into my diet, as well as different kinds of nuts. it's so important to be properly nourished for math and yet I neglect it so much

yesterday I had a conversation with my friend and he said that his vision for doing math is working on some huge open problem such as RH. obviously you do you, but this sounds like such a depressive idea to me lol. chances of solving something like this are almost non-existent, that's such a waste of time to work on something like this for 10, 20, 50 years and make no progress. I mean, it certainly would feel nice to prove or disprove something like RH, but I'm perfectly fine with reading papers and answering all the questions I can anwer, which might not be huge and famous but I'm pretty sure creating those small pieces of theory will be useful to somebody one day

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7 XI 2022

I think I found an advisor and a topic for the bsc thesis! or rather they found me

one of the teachers that prepares us for writing our theses approached me and started asking about homology I mentioned during our presentation, he wanted to know what courses I took and how familiar I am with that stuff. I told him that I know a bit about homology only from self-study but I enjoyed everything from algebraic topo so far and I would be happy to write about something from that. "ok then I'll find the right topic for you" was his response. then he suggested I read Groups of Homotopy Spheres by Milnor and Kervaire and write about surgery theory. I was sold the moment I heard that name, it's almost as funny as writing about the hairy ball

so there she is, very high level, very complicated. I barely skimmed the first half of that 34-page paper, it's gonna take a lot of work before I learn the basics necessary to even comprehend what is going on. it feels good to be noticed tho, I'm so happy to start writing asap

other than that my mood hasn't been in a great place, because commutative algebra is super hard and I am struggling to find the right resources to study. the last thing we did was tensor product and I've been procrastinating actually studying it by making pretty notes lol

I found a textbook that seems decent. the theory is very thoroughly explained here and there are plenty of exercises ranging from easy to difficult ones

recently I've been trying a new method of tracking, which is instead of writing to-do lists, I write down what I did each day, here is what it looks like for now:

I find it much less anxiety-inducing than the to-do approach because I know damn well what I need to do and writing down what I actually completed feels much better than crossing things off of the list

this week I hope to study the tensor product, representable functors (yoneda is still not done with me) and probably start the complex analysis homework. if I have time I will study the prerequisites for the Milnor's paper

26 IX 2022

I spent the past few days watching good doctor and doing algebra (mostly). I am trying to get used to working in the library

right now I'm at the math camp for the olympiad where I'm giving a lecture on the power of a point and radical axes

I wish I had been in a more math-oriented highschool, I feel like I missed out on so much. my school was focused on literature and philosophy, I switched to math and physics in my last year. on the one hand it's probably a nice achievement that I've managed to get into the university to study math, on the other hand I could have done so much more

I've been struggling to motivate myself to study lately, because the semester starts next week and I cannot really start anything new right now, but I also don't have anything in particular that I could continue. I decided to just read eisenbud and solve some exercises with homology

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

Zero to the power of anything is zero. Anything to the zeroth power is one. So what is zero to the zeroth power?

The world's most cited mathematicians would seem to be in disagreement about the issue

29 VII 2021

got vaxxed today and spent the rest of the day with bf

sleep: trash. been falling asleep at 4am again, "i'll try to go to bed before 3" my ass

concentration: alright. i'm as always extremely productive and i didn't find it hard to focus recently

no phone time: alright. i'm so immersed in my work that i forget to check the phone and i don't really feel inclined to talk to people or look at social media anyway

didn't do any pure math today, did some applied instead, which was working on SVM with friends from my uni. we got stuck on solving the quadratic programming problem but we're almost done

tomorrow i'm planning to go back to the chapter about operations on topo spaces, finish the art comission I got and finish some functionalities in the digital animation project i'm doing with bf. much finishing, this is how i like things to be

I know one person who started phd without master's but that's in computer science and he already had a research startup running independently. he had a med degree already and his research is about using ML in medicine, so he was granted a "special permission" to start a phd. the guy is a very hard-working genius

now when it comes to math, one of my friends claimed that it is possible to start phd after bsc if someone graduates magna cum laude or something. I never heard of that before and it sounds insane, so I asked my advisor about it and he never heard of that either lol moreover he said that it's a stupid idea unless someone already has a few publications

afaik in the US the undergraduate degree takes 4 years and phd takes 5, it's like a mix of masters and the actual phd, so I guess it evens itself out

okay this might sound stupid to a lot of you but I thought you need a masters degree before you can do a PhD. so weird to me seeing 22 year olds doing a PhD after a bachelors degree. I don't know where I got this idea but I'm having a hard time rearranging my world view around this, even though this is so inconsequential thing to be wrong about xd

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

Astronaut sculpture from an ex-physicist (Source/Credit)