thinking about the time a prof told us that in real research mathematics it's fine to be slow, speed itself is not essential, as long as you can find it within yourself to make consistent unyielding inexorable forward progress, like the time some guy stole an M60A3 tank and terrorized a suburban neighborhood with it, said guy wasn't going that fast but plowed through cars and telephone poles and shit no problem. i'm not kidding that's what he said, that's the metaphor he used, he told us that the act of mathematics is like the 1995 san diego tank rampage
hey be nice to me im just a teenage girl who has legally been an adult for years
omg this + bonus points if this is yet another "autistic genius" representation. don't even get me started on how harmful both of those things are for various reasons
Fuck the way media talks about “child prodigies” and “geniuses” especially in fields like music and mathematics.
Like they are gods whose level of understanding we could never reach.
How come we rarely hear about all the people who started young and then fizzled out? How come we never hear the stories of people who started late in life and made a huge difference.
Why do we only hear about their natural aptitude and not the hard work and misteps they took to get there.
For gods sake…
Terry is just a guy!
→ 25 VIII 2021
ok so it's been very busy for me for the past few days. we made the yt video with bf and i finally moved out from my parents
concentration: 4 (recently)
i did some topo but not in a very by-the-book way, more like just reading some interesting stuff in various places. homotopy is super fascinating and visual, i love it. other than that i read about other basic concepts such as compact spaces, connected spaces and axioms of countability. i used to read about the aforementioned axioms a while ago and think "why would you even define something like this why does it matter" but after reading topology by jänich i have the intuition that the first axiom is strongly related to the convergence of sequences, hence knowing that the space is first-countable might be useful for evaluating things like the continuity of mappings and compactness
now, i also have a book called elementary concepts of topology by alexandroff and i can't stop reading it, i'm on the page 20 out of 60 since yesterday. and i think i might finish it today but i'll see. i also want to study 1-dimensional manifolds today or tomorrow
We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like being banished into forests far from everyone. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
Franz Kafka
The chili plant made a deal with their God to only be consumed by things that could spread its seeds and fly. The chili received capsaicin, making itself painful to eat for mammals, but not birds, and all was well for the chili.
Then the human shows up, tastes it, and likes the pain. So now there's this flightless fucking mammal eating the chili. Like not even a fruit bat or anything, a flightless fucking mammal chomping on the chili.
What the fucking shit, God, cried the chili, I specifically requested the opposite of this.
Now hold on, wait a moment, replied the God who talks to plants but has no idea what the fuck these apes are going to do next. It might be something cool.
And in a flash of a second, in barely fraction of the time that chili took to develop capsaicin, the humans went from walking across land bridges and rowing little boats across small waters, into building ships that could cross oceans. More humans tasted the chili, and liked the pain. They took the seeds with them, and planted it elsewhere.
See? They spread the seeds.
They're still not flying, said the chili, still feeling insulted and betrayed.
But before the conversation was over, the humans were still not done fucking around and nowhere close to finding out. The ships became machines, and another machine was invented, capable of flight. Now, not only were the humans farming chili on continents far too far away for any of the birds that originally ate it could dream of flying, but the chili flew with them to lands where it could possibly not grow, so that humans over there could also eat it and enjoy the pain.
You see? They spread your seeds and fly.
It doesn't count as keeping a promise if you only manage it by a fucking accident, said the chili, still somewhat insulted. But nonetheless, the chili thrived.
why is deciding on a title for my thesis so hard
me when Čech cohomology
i love math. i hate math. i can do it all day, everyday. i cannot solve a single question. it's my favorite subject. I would rather kms than open the book. it's beautiful and everything makes sense and it's the best. it's fucking useless and nothing is logical and it's the worst. it's the loml. it's my arch nemesis.
Me: *Removes my cat from my lap to do something else.*
My cat: Father is…evil? Father is unyielding? Father is incapable of love? I am running away. I am packing my little rucksack and going out to explore the world as a lone vagabond. I can no longer thrive in this household.
this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability
⁕ pure math undergrad ⁕ in love with anything algebraic ⁕
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