Foolproof Plan

7-9 VIII 2021

did math and coding nothing special really

sleep: good

concentration: good

phone time: good

reading about measure theory. here is a great book:

everything is so well explained here. i wish i could do more math than i have time for but i guess it's fine, it's holidays, i will wreck my brain completely anyway when october comes

tomorrow more measure theory and topo

13 X 2022

I dedicated the weekend to meeting with people from the machine learning club, helping my friend through her analysis homework and studying category theory for one of my subjects. then I did mostly the complex analysis homework

here are some wannabe aesthetic notes

my main goal at the time was to truly understand yoneda's lemma and the main intuition I have is that sometimes we shouldn't study the category C, but thw category of all functors from C to Set

after studying for a few hours I can say that the concept became a bit more intuitive

one of the problems in my "putnam homework" was to calculate the product of all differences of distinct n-th roots of unity – or so I thought. for a few days I believed that my solution doesn't work. I ended up with a disgusting fomula interating cosines of obscure angles but the visual intuition is neat, especially for an odd n. aaand that's no surprise since it turns out I'm fucking illiterate. not distinct roots, just differences of distinct roots, so that the whole thing is symmetric and there is no distinction of n odd vs n even

anyway I finally solved it, so that's nice!

I completed 5 out of 10 problems, which was my goal, so I should stop now and do my commutative algebra homework. there is one more exercise I want to solve:

the complex polynomial P with integer coefficients is such that |P(z)| ≤ 2 ∀z∈S¹. how many non-zero coefficients can P have?

I'm almost there with it and it's really cool

ofc the opportunity to include pretty drawings in my homework couldn't be wasted

during my category theory tutorial the professor asked me to show my solution on the blackboard. I was kinda stressed because now is the first time when I have my lectures and tutorials in english and on top of that this is a grad course. that whole morning I was fighting to stay awake, after the blackboard incident I didn't have to anymore

this is what I did

this week is likely to be the hardest out of many proceeding ones, because I won't have the weekend for studying (it's my grandma's birthday) so I need to use the maximum of my time during the week and get as much done as possible. I still need to do two homeworks, and study the theory. I am trying to learn how to prioritize and plan things, this is still a huge problem for me

I found an interesting youtube channel: Justin Sung. he talks about how to study/ how to learn and I like what he says, because it just makes so much sense. it's been a while since I started suspecting that methods such as flash cards or simple note-taking don't work and his content explains very well why they indeed might not work. it's very inspiring to see a professional confirm one's intuition

Someone is bisexual if they are both monosexual and episexual

tips for studying math

I thought I could share what I learned about studying math so far. it will be very subjective with no scientific sources, pure personal experience, hence one shouldn't expect all of this to work, I merely hope to give some ideas

1. note taking

some time ago I stopped caring about making my notes pretty and it was a great decision – they are supposed to be useful. moreover, I try to write as little as possible. this way my notes contain only crucial information and I might actually use them later because finding things becomes much easier. there is no point in writing down everything, a lot of the time it suffices to know where to find things in the textbook later. also, I noticed that taking notes doesn't actually help me remember, I use it to process information that I'm reading, and if I write down too many details it becomes very chaotic. when I'm trying to process as much as possible in the spot while reading I'm better at structuring the information. so my suggestion would be to stop caring about the aesthetics and try to write down only what is the most important (such as definitions, statements of theorems, useful facts)

2. active learning

do not write down the proof as is, instead write down general steps and then try to fill in the details. it would be perfect to prove everything from scratch, but that's rarely realistic, especially when the exam is in a few days. breaking the proof down into steps and describing the general idea of each step naturally raises questions such as "why is this part important, what is the goal of this calculation, how to describe this reasoning in one sentence, what are we actually doing here". sometimes it's possible to give the proof purely in words, that's also a good idea. it's also much more engaging and creative than passively writing things down. another thing that makes learning more active is trying to come up with examples for the definitions

3. exercises

many textbooks give exercises between definitions and theorem, doing them right away is generally a good idea, that's another way to make studying more active. I also like to take a look at the exercises at the end of the chapter (if that's the case) once in a while to see which ones I could do with what I already learned and try to do them. sometimes it's really hard to solve problems freshly after studying the theory and that's what worked out examples are for, it helps. mamy textbooks offer solutions of exercises, I like to compare the "official" ones with mine. it's obviously better than reading the solution before solving the problem on my own, but when I'm stuck for a long time I check if my idea for the solution at least makes sense. if it's similar to the solution from the book then I know I should just keep going

4. textbooks and other sources

finding the right book is so important. I don't even want to think about all the time I wasted trying to work with a book that just wasn't it. when I need a textbook for something I google "best textbooks for [topic]" and usually there is already a discussion on MSE where people recommend sources and explain why they think that source is a good one, which also gives the idea of how it's written and what to expect. a lot of professors share their lecture/class notes online, which contain user-friendly explenations, examples, exercises chosen by experienced teachers to do in their class, sometimes you can even find exercises with solutions. using the internet is such an important skill

5. studying for exams

do not study the material in a linear order, instead do it by layers. skim everything to get the general idea of which topics need the most work, which can be skipped, then study by priority. other than that it's usually better to know the sketch of every proof than to know a half of them in great detail and the rest not at all. it's similar when it comes to practice problems, do not spend half of your time on easy stuff that could easily be skipped, it's better to practice a bit of everything than to be an expert in half of the topics and unable to solve easy problems from the rest. if the past papers are available they can be a good tool to take a "mock exam" after studying for some time, it gives an opoortunity to see, again, which topics need the most work

6. examples and counterexamples

there are those theorems with statements that take up half of the page because there are just so many assumptions. finding counterexamples for each assumption usually helps with that. when I have a lot of definitions to learn, thinking of examples for them makes everything more specific therefore easier to remember

7. motivation

and by that I mean motivation of concepts. learning something new is much easier if it's motivated with an interesting example, a question, or application. it's easier to learn something when I know that it will be useful later, it's worth it to try to make things more interesting

8. studying for exams vs studying longterm

oftentimes it is the case that the exam itself requires learning some specific types of problems, which do not really matter in the long run. of course, preparing for exams is important, but keep in mind that what really matters is learning things that will be useful in the future especially when they are relevant to the field of choice. just because "this will not be on the test" doesn't always mean it can be skipped

ok I think that's all I have for now. I hope someone will find these helpful and feel free to share yours

I'm glad I never encoutered anyone with such serious mindset while I was studying programming because now I wouldn't have as much fun writing branchless things in python, which is completely useless in highlevel languages but I just can't resist

I feel like some people are too serious with learning how to program. “I gotta be the best in this and that and build this and that to impress this employer” blah blah, that kills the fun out of programming. I see a lot of people (bashing people on Twitter again and actually a few people on here too, oops) making programming such a serious topic and you can’t have fun in it. Besides the proper syntax, documentation, best practises whatever, people in the tech community have putting up “rules” about how you should program and what to learn and if you fall out of that, you get ridiculed for it. Literally making it less fun.

Someone said that there’s no point in learning jQuery because JavaScript alone can do all that jQuery can and more.

So? I’m still going to learn it for fun? I’m having a blast with SCSS and jQuery, I don’t care 🤷🏾‍♀️ and I’ll learn the other frameworks and libraries that suits me because I want to. I don’t care if the entire tech community stops using a technology - if it interests me, I’m still going to learn it~!

Also no hate or anything to that person who said that to me - I completely understand your POV on jQuery! 💗✨ When I first read comment, I was a bit down like “oh what’s the point then…” but slapped myself and was like “I’m not learning for them or anyone. This library is cool and I like it so I’m still gonna use it”

Moral of the story: just do you. Do what makes you happy, code what you happy. Don’t be so serious all the time and make stupid dumb programs or games or websites whatever. Have fun in such a hard subject!!!

I know your thesis was about something to do with algebraic topology, may I ask what exactly it was about?

(and congrats to you getting your bachelors degree and into a masters program)

(thank you!)

my thesis was about an open question regarding a certain skein module of tangles on 2n nodes. the conjecture is that the module is free and in my thesis I constructed a generating set that is free for n=2,3 (direct calculation) but I have yet to prove that for a general n. if you are interested I can send you the paper in which the question was posed, all the details are explained there and would be hard to write down here without tex lol

I have just met you and I love you (via)

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

when a pelican bites you there's no malice in their eyes. they aren't upset at you. they are just hungry and want to see if you fit in their mouths. and if you don't then it's no problem and everything is fine. and if you do then well i guess your fate is sealed but that's ok it's a beautiful animal

Visualization of the Rubik's cube