Bsdndprplplld - You Can't Comb A Hairy Ball

yes, this. taking photos of the blackboard and writing down only the "sketch" of the lecture usually does the trick for me: I have all the details I need but I'm able to actually listen

a thing that i didn’t understand as a student, that many of my students don’t understand, and that i still sometimes struggle to put into practice: taking the most detailed notes is not always the best way to learn the material. trying to write down every single thing a teacher (or other person who is presenting auditory information to you) says is not only slow but it also can easily stop you from being mentally present during the lesson, internalizing the main ideas and how everything fits together, which is what will actually help you learn the material.

I finally tried mindmaps to keep track of the 200 kinds of morphisms and another 100 kinds of sheaves (that one is work in progress)

I kinda like the result and I hope to finally use my notes in the future

→ 30 VIII 2021

not much has happened really

concentration: 4

doing topo as usual, stopped doing as much analysis, just enjoying my break from coding with abstract ideas

reading books about math became sort of a comfort thing for me. i fell in love with just sitting there and trying to imagine everything. i wish i could be payed for studying math, i would be a fucking billionaire at this point

I have a bunch of followers and mutuals that I never even talked to and I know some of you guys are very into math too, so let's get to know each other, shall we?

if you feel like you'd enjoy talking to me then go ahead, write me a message! I just realized I never said something like this and I would really love to have conversations with like-minded people

if this feels familiar, you can reblog this post to invite people to talk to you

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day?

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day? - gist:4158578

“A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what’s going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it’s not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don’t really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you’re only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?

“It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy.”

That’s certainly better than nothing, but it doesn’t tell you everything you might want to know about a vacuum cleaner. Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean a cat? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors?

The authors of the papers and books are trying to communicate what they’ve understood as best they can under these restrictions, and it’s certainly better than nothing, but if you’re going to have to work with vacuum cleaners, you need to know much more.

Fortunately, math has an incredibly powerful tool that helps bridge the gap. Namely, when we come up with concepts, we also come up with very explicit symbols and notation, along with logical rules for manipulating them. It’s a bit like being handed the technical specifications and diagrams for building a vacuum cleaner out of parts.

The upside is that now you (in theory) can know 100% unambiguously what a vacuum cleaner can or cannot do. The downside is that you still have no clue what the pieces are for or why they are arranged the way they are, except for the cryptic sentence, “It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy.”

OK, so now you’re a grad student, and your advisor gives you an important paper in the field to read: “A Tool that does Suck Dust.” The introduction tells you that “It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy,” and a bunch of other reasonable but vague things. The bulk of the paper is technical diagrams and descriptions of a vacuum cleaner. Then there are some references: “How to use air flow to suck up dust.” “How to use many a coil of wire to make a fan spin very fast.” “What you get from the hole in the wall that has wire in it.”

So, what do you do? Technically, you sit at your desk and think. But it’s not that simple. First, you’re like, lol, that title almost sounds like it could be sexual innuendo. Then you read the introduction, which pleasantly tells you what things are generally about, but is completely vague about the important details.

Then you get to the technical diagrams and are totally confused, but you work through them piece by piece. You redo many of the calculations on your own just to double check that you’ve really understood what’s going on. Sometimes, the calculations that you redo come up with something stupid, and then you have to figure out what you’ve understood incorrectly, and then reread that part of the technical manual to figure things out. Except sometimes there was a typo in the paper, so that’s what screwed things up for you.

After a while, things finally click, and you finally understand what a vacuum cleaner is. In fact, you actually know much more: You’ve now become one of the experts on vacuum cleaners, or at least on this particular kind of vacuum cleaner, and you know a good fraction of the details on how it works. You’re feeling pretty proud of yourself, even though you’re still a far shot from your advisor: They understand all sorts of other kinds of vacuum cleaners, even Roombas, and, in addition to their work on vacuum cleaners, they’re also working on a related but completely different project about air conditioning systems.

You are filled with joy that you can finally talk on par with your advisor, at least on this topic, but there is a looming dark cloud on the horizon: You still need to write a thesis.

So, you think about new things that you can do with vacuum cleaners. So, first, you’re like: I can use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves! That’d be super-useful! But then you do a Google Scholar search and it turns out that someone else did that like ten years ago.

OK, your next idea: I can use a vacuum cleaner to clean cats! That’d also be super-useful. But, alas, a bit more searching in the literature reveals that someone tried that, too, but they didn’t get good results. You’re a confident young grad student, so you decide that, armed with some additional techniques that you happen to know, you might fix the problems that the other researcher had and get vacuuming cats to work. You spend several months on it, but, alas, it doesn’t get you any further.

OK, so then, after more thinking and doing some research on extension cords, you think it would be feasible to use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors. You look in the literature, and it turns out that nobody’s ever thought of doing that! You proudly tell this idea to your advisor, but they do some back of the envelope calculations that you don’t really understand and tell you that vacuuming the outdoors is unlikely to be very useful. Something about how a vacuum cleaner is too small to handle the outdoors and that we already know about other tools that are much better equipped for cleaning streets and such.

This goes on for several years, and finally you write a thesis about how if you turn a vacuum cleaner upside-down and submerge the top end in water, you can make bubbles!

Your thesis committee is unsure of how this could ever be useful, but it seems pretty cool and bubbles are pretty, so they think that maybe something useful could come out of it eventually. Maybe.

And, indeed, you are lucky! After a hundred years or so, your idea (along with a bunch of other ideas) leads to the development of aquarium air pumps, an essential tool in the rapidly growing field of research on artificial goldfish habitats. Yay!”

26 III 2023

I had a lot of headaches recently, idk why. probably something to do with muscle tension, because my back, neck and jaw just lock up sometimes to the point that every movement hurts. I need to see a doctor about it, maybe I injured something or there is some other underlying cause

I wasn't very strict with studying this week, because a lot of stuff we did was a review of what I already knew but obviously it needs a refresher. if I keep ignoring it, I will end up in a situation where I won't know what's going on at all

I picked up some side hustles along the way, one of which is reading the extra topics from hatcher. one of the lecturers recommended a book to me, about galois theory in the context of covering spaces, I'm reading it right now, seems pretty good

tomorrow I'm seeing my advisor to discuss my progress with solving the problem for my thesis. I think I found the basis for the module, at least I proved that the set I chose generates all the other elements, remains to show that it's linearly independent. the second part of the question is the rank of the module, which is how an algebraic topology problem turned into a nasty cominatorics problem eh

today I completed the first "serious" task for my IT job, which was translating the code from java to python. I have never seen java before, but it looks a lot like c++, so I managed. I wrote 500 lines of code but I haven't tested it yet so debugging might be very painful. lol I guess that means I shouldn't say I completed the task

I am wondering if I should go to a conference, I have until the end of the month to submit a presentation. I am not sure if I can handle a trip to another city, it would be in a month, so there is no way to predict how I'll be feeling. this week I am giving a presentation about some knot theory (skein modules, bracket and jones polynomial) and it's a good pick for the conference too, which makes it a really touch choice as the hardest part will already be done. idk I guess I'll toss a coin, like I did about the IT job lmao

other than that, big thanks to everyone who interacted with my post about book recommendations! there are many great suggestions, it turned out much better than I expected tbh, I thought I would get like 2 or 3 notes. I will post a list of the books mentioned in that post, so it will be easier to find for anyone interested

hey be nice to me im just a teenage girl who has legally been an adult for years

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)

well, google, one of them is a giant fuckin red dog

5 IX 2022

maybe once a month is a bit too seldom to post? I kinda want to form a habit of romanticizing my academic life, I see all those studyblr accounts with beautiful photos of their desks and notes and I'm pretty sure those images exist in their minds as well

maybe one day I will be considered studyspo lol

I'm just starting to work on some geometry problems for today, haven't yet decided what I will focus on, but there is this one problem that haunted me when I tried to sleep yestarday:

given a triangle ABC with ∠A = 60°, let P be a point in the interior of ABC such that ∠APB = ∠APC = 120°. prove that ∠APX = 90°, for X being the circumcenter of ABC

it's supposed to be solved using spiral similarity, which is a composition of a rotation and homothety. there was another problem that was listed as "spiral similarity exercise", but I proved it with angle chasing exclusively, creating some nasty drawings in the process

other than geometry I'm studying homology, at the moment the basics of homological algebra, such as the first proofs by diagram chasing and exact sequences

I made some notes for exact sequences induced in homology

my perspective on doing math is slowly changing I think, I feel inspired to search for problems that I would like to solve. I noticed that I have this mental block: before I start doing math for real, I need to learn all the theory. which is absurd, you can never learn all the theory

sure, obtaining truly groundbreaking results requires years of learning theory and mastering tools if you want to specialize in algebraic topology and geometry, but the mindset I have creates the comfort zone of "play safe, just read your textbook, no challenges for now" and I'm starting to see beyond that

right now I'm taking my first steps into understanding that reading textbooks and learning how to solve basic exercises is not enough. they are just methods that are supposed to help my creativity and curiosity do their thing. essentially what I've been doing so far is not math, merely the preparation to do math in the future. no wonder I've been feeling so bored recently, all I'm doing is just learning basic tools. the idealist in me is asking to be unleashed

I feel like I'm about to see something much bigger than me