Ofc That's Right, Thank You For Fact Checking!

when I (fucking finally) finish this semester I plan to do a deep dive into TQFT and frobenius algebras with this book recommended by my supervisor:

I find the concept to be very elegant. loosely speaking, take a commutative ring R and an algebra A over this ring that satisfies the axioms of the frobenius algebra. it turns out that for any such algebra there is an R-module associated to a certain 3-manifold, in which there are operations (induced by the algebra) on cobordisms between the systems of curves embedded in the boundary of the manifold. this is related to knot theory and apparently to some quantum blah blah, which I don't know much about yet

rb this with your favorite math concepts/books/videos... things u enjoy and that make you excited! (or reply but i want to hear about it and if you rb it then i hear more cool stuff from more people)

my favorite books are the grapes of math and things to make and do in the fourth dimension. i'm also reallyyyy wanting to read number freak and godel, escher, bach. concepts i love are chaos theory, non-euclidean geometry, and dimensions beyond 3rd!

you know girls can tell when you look at their boobs

i don’t care how quickly you glance, 1 second is like 5 seconds in boob time

so, for relativistic boobtime, where t is the observer, and t’ is the time measured at the boob. t=t’/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2) solving for t=1, and t’=5, we get that the boobspeed, v, is represented by v=+/- (6*10^8)sqrt(6)i m/s

boobs travel at 1.5 gigametres per second in the complex direction.

that's an interesting perspective

recently I've been thinking about it in an opposite way. it started during a conversation about brains, in particular how stupid and flawed they are, I realized that I enjoy math because it gives me a break from being human. there is no place for emotion and cognitive bias, only formal reasoning and proofs. it feels so safe and so distant from the day-to-day life filled with problems caused by the human nature, it feels so clean. it's a place for me to enjoy only the best qualities of my existence. it's an acceptable way to separate myself from everyone, and simultaneously stay connected

I love how different this is from what is described above, as if math offered a place for everyone to find something that they will like

Im trying to find a really long Tumblr post that talked about how sad it was that people are so happy to complain about how much they hated math and how math can be a way to connect with your fundamental humanity and...

Yeah, I've been studying a little bit of it on my own, ten years after I dropped out of college, I've been going back to seeing some basics of calculus, and I've been really feeling some of that.

There is this sense that math is this alien thing, separate from the true concerns of humanity. This external topic, strange and inhumane that only those few weirdos with a eccentric and atypical cast of mind, who are themselves separate by a few degrees from human nature, can grasp.

But it's not that, We, messy warm emotional dumb humans came up with it, we silly atavistic creatures dedicated so much time and effort to develop it and explore it, this silly, quirky, wet, ape-like species is the only living creature on this planet that concerns itself with doing math in any serious capacity. It didn't come from aliens or the gods or from dolphins, math came from humans and humans are the only ones that use them. There could be nothing more human, more fundamentally ours, more intrinsic to our nature than math.

And it's not just a tool! Is not just this thing to be celebrated because its useful in a purely base pragmatical, prosaic way. Is not this thing we have to dissapasionatly conceed credit to because I guess it does useful things like bridges and rockets and computers and taxes. Math is not just the civilizational equivalent of going to the dentist or eating your vegetables.

i hesitate to call it a philosophy or an art, it is a way of human thinking, it is a way of thinking like a human, of thinking in a way that only humans can think. its is one of our oldest and proudest traditions, it is a way to feel greater than onself, it is a way of growing. it is a song with a prosody all its own. There is such a profound sense of meaning and beauty and truth and purpose to be found in math, and the best of all is that it works, when it says something it means something, its telling you a thing that is meaningful, that represents something true, that couldnt be any other way, that has consequences and uses and can be relied upon, that it representes something which carries weight and its ours, its truly a part of our nature, of what we are.

7 X 2022

my first week is over. I'm tired and I can tell already that it will be a hard semester. I have already spent more than 15 hours on my complex analysis homework and I solved 1 problem out of 10, ugh

this subject is gonna give me major impostor syndrom lmao I know that these problems are putnam level difficulty but it's frustrating to have spent the whole day on something and fail. and I'm not kidding, I have a book on problem solving techinques for putnam and the exercises there are easier than those we do in class

one could say I'm bragging but it doesn't mean anything if I can complete only 1 of 10 problems which is a trivial corollary from Vieta's and took me about 4 hours to realize anyway

algebra homework was relatively easy, I discussed it with a few people who also take the course and together we completed the whole thing

for now I still have the motivation to try to look good so this week I've been pulling off dark academia aesthetic

I am afraid of my brain because it likes to give me meltdowns right when I need my cognitive performance to be reliable. I spent the whole holiday working on coping skills so I could spend less time sitting on the floor and crying

I spend most of the time with my boyfriend studying together. having a body double really helps

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!!!

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

fields of mathematics

number theory: The Queen of Mathematics, in that it takes a lot from other fields and provides little in return, and people are weirdly sentimental about it.

combinatorics: Somehow simultaneously the kind of people who get really excited about Martin Gardner puzzles and very serious no-nonsense types who don’t care about understanding why something is true as long as they can prove that it’s true.

algebraic geometry: Here’s an interesting metaphor, and here’s several thousand pages of work fleshing it out.

differential geometry: There’s a lot of really cool stuff built on top of a lot of boring technical details, but they frequently fill entire textbooks or courses full of just the boring stuff, and they seem to think students will find this interesting in itself rather than as a necessary prerequisite to something better. So there’s definitely something wrong with them.

category theory: They don’t really seem to understand that the point of generalizing a result is so that you can apply it to other situations.

differential equations: physicists

real analysis: What if we took the most boring parts of a proof and just spent all our time studying those?

point-set topology: See real analysis, but less relevant to the real world.

complex analysis: Sorcery. I thought it seemed like sorcery because I didn’t know much about it, but then I learned more, and now the stuff I learned just seems like sorcery that I know how to do.

algebraic topology: Some of them are part of a conspiracy with category theorists to take over mathematics. I’m pretty sure that most algebraic topologists aren’t involved in that, but I don’t really know what else they’re up to.

functional analysis: Like real analysis but with category theorists’ generalization fetish.

group theory: Probably masochists? It’s hard to imagine how else someone could be motivated to read a thousand-page paper, let alone write one.

operator algebras: Seems cool but I can’t understand a word of it, so I can’t be sure they’re not just bullshitting the whole thing.

commutative/homological algebra: Diagram chases are of the devil, and these people are his worshipers.

Me when I need to rotate 720 degrees to return to my original state

→ 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

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