Theory Time

at some point I was wondering what about the researcher publishing their paper in an expensive journal and it turns out that the author does not make a lot of money from that, so it really is about fucking this exploitative system and not doing any substantial harm to the researcher, if anyone was worrying like I was

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…

25 VIII 2022

I found the most beautiful math book I have ever seen

it covers the basics of algebraic topology: homotopy, homology, spectral sequences and some other stuff

one of the authors (Fomenko) was a student when this book was being published, he made all the drawings. imagine being an artist and a mathematician aaand making math art

just look at them

other than those drawing masterpieces there are illustrations of mathematical concepts

I'm studying homology right now, so it brings me joy to know that this book exists. I don't know how well it's written yet, but from skimming the first few pages it seems fine

I just finished watching a lecture about exact sequences and I find the concept of homology really pretty: it's like measuring to what extent the sequence of abelian groups fails to be exact

I'm trying to find my way of taking notes. time and again I catch myself zoning out and passively writing down the definitions, so right now I avoid taking notes until it's with a goal of using the writing as a tool for acquiring understanding. I'm trying to create the representations of objects and their basic relations in my mind at first, then maybe use the process of note-taking to further analyze less obvious properties and solving some problems

I will post more about it in the future, we'll see how that goes

just had a reflection about perfectionism. today I had an exam for which I was prepared very well, but my stupid brain happened and I didn't get the highest grade. my boyfriend was comforting me and he asked since when I want to ace everything, this question made me think

indeed, I don't want to ace everything. I am taking 4 courses this semester, one of which I don't care about enough to strive for the best grade, one of which is way too hard to aim that far, two of which I thought were achievable. and now I didn't achieve that. it feels different to set unrealistic goals and then never achieve them than to set very realistic ones and still fail, that's what I realized today

I am not a perfectionist. I used to be, years ago, and then I learned to set realistic goals. now I'm thinking, isn't perfectionism a kind of a coping mechanism? deep down you know your goals are impossible, so it's not really surprising when you fail. you are never satisfied, sure, but maybe it does feel more safe this way than to not know if you will be satisfied or disappointed. if that's the case then setting realistic goals is absolutely not the way to heal perfectionism

when K ⊆ L is a finite extension by one element, say α with the minimal polynomial f, we can write 0 → (f) → K[x] → L → 0, where (f) is the kernel of evaluation at α. this is quite disappointing and very basic, but I haven't found anything better really. when there are finitely many intermediate fields between K and L for an extension L/K, L can be expressed as an extension by one element (Artin's theorem), which is still very specific

I didn't know about the group extensions, it makes the category of fields even more disgusting. I was hoping that the algebraic closure can be expressed as a colimit but of course not, not in the general case at least. but maybe at least some type of extensions can be realized as such? that's a nice thing to ponder. I'm pretty sure it will fail like every other request I had for this abomination of a category

I wonder what is typically done to make working with this category more pleasant. passing to Grp with the Galois group is one idea, the other I guess would be working with vector spaces or algebras? that would make sense considering that integral and finite ring maps are a thing and the field automorphisms play a role in the integral closure of ℤ in ℚ[√d]

on a sidenote, I laughed at the "lower body" and it reminds me how funny it is to talk about kernels in Polish. kernels and testicles are the same word

I've always thought 'splitting field' was a very cool sounding term. The Galois theorists did good with that one

When banned from using "trivially" in a proof...

“Hello all. In a fellow mathposter's topology class they were not allowed to use the word "trivially" or any synonym thereof his proofs. The person presenting his work then crossed out "trivially" and wrote instead "indubitably." This inspired him to write a program that will insert condescending adverbial phrases before any statement in a math proof. Trivially, this is a repost. Below is the list--please come up with more if you can!

Obviously

Clearly

Anyone can see that

Trivially

Indubitably

It follows that

Evidently

By basic applications of previously proven lemmas,

The proof is left to the reader that

It goes without saying that

Consequently

By immediate consequence,

Of course

But then again

By symmetry

Without loss of generality,

Anyone with a fifth grade education can see that

I would wager 5 dollars that

By the contrapositive

We need not waste ink in proving that

By Euler

By Fermat

By a simple diagonalization argument,

We all agree that

It would be absurd to deny that

Unquestionably,

Indisputably,

It is plain to see that

It would be embarrassing to miss the fact that

It would be an insult to my time and yours to prove that

Any cretin with half a brain could see that

By Fermat’s Last Theorem,

By the Axiom of Choice,

It is equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis that

By a simple counting argument,

Simply put,

One’s mind immediately leaps to the conclusion that

By contradiction,

I shudder to think of the poor soul who denies that

It is readily apparent to the casual observer that

With p < 5% we conclude that

It follows from the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms that

Set theory tells us that

Divine inspiration reveals to us that

Patently,

Needless to say,

By logic

By the Laws of Mathematics

By all means,

With probability 1,

Who could deny that

Assuming the Continuum Hypothesis,

Galois died in order to show us that

There is a marvellous proof (which is too long to write here) that

We proved in class that

Our friends over at Harvard recently discovered that

It is straightforward to show that

By definition,

By a simple assumption,

It is easy to see that

Even you would be able to see that

Everybody knows that

I don’t know why anybody would ask, but

Between you and me,

Unless you accept Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem,

A reliable source has told me

It is a matter of simple arithmetic to show that

Beyond a shadow of a doubt,

When we view this problem as an undecidable residue class whose elements are universal DAGs, we see that

You and I both know that

And there you have it,

And as easy as ABC,

And then as quick as a wink,

If you’ve been paying attention you’d realize that

By the Pigeonhole Principle

By circular reasoning we see that

When we make the necessary and sufficient assumptions,

It is beyond the scope of this course to prove that

Only idealogues and sycophants would debate whether

It is an unfortunately common misconception to doubt that

By petitio principii, we assert that

We may take for granted that

For legal reasons I am required to disclose that

It is elementary to show that

I don’t remember why, but you’ll have to trust me that

Following the logical steps, we might conclude

We are all but forced to see that

By the same logic,

I’m not even going to bother to prove that

By Kant’s Categorical imperative,

Everyone and their mother can see that

A child could tell you that

It baffles me that you haven’t already realized that

Notice then that

Just this once I will admit to you that

Using the proper mindset one sees that

Remember the basic laws of common sense:

There is a lovely little argument that shows that

Figure 2 (not shown here) makes it clear that

Alas, would that it were not true that

If I’m being honest with you,

According to the pointy-headed theorists sitting in their Ivory Towers in academia,

We will take as an axiom that

Accept for the moment that

These are your words, not mine, but

A little birdie told me that

I heard through the grapevine that

In the realm of constructive mathematics,

It is a theorem from classical analysis that

Life is too short to prove that

A consequence of IUT is that

As practitioners are generally aware,

It is commonly understood that

As the reader is no doubt cognizant,

As an exercise for the reader, show that

All the cool kids know that

It is not difficult to see that

Terry Tao told me in a personal email that

Behold,

Verify that

In particular,

Moreover,

Yea verily

By inspection,

A trivial but tedious calculation shows that

Suppose by way of contradiction that

By a known theorem,

Henceforth

Recall that

Wherefore said He unto them,

It is the will of the Gods that

It transpires that

We find

As must be obvious to the meanest intellect,

It pleases the symmetry of the world that

Accordingly,

If there be any justice in the world,

It is a matter of fact that

It can be shown that

Implicitly, then

Ipso facto

Which leads us to the conclusion that

Which is to say

That is,

The force of deductive logic then drives one to the conclusion that

Whereafter we find

Assuming the reader’s intellect approaches that of the writer, it should be obvious that

Ergo

With God as my witness,

As a great man once told me,

One would be hard-pressed to disprove that

Even an applied mathematician would concede that

One sees in a trice that

You can convince yourself that

Mama always told me

I know it, you know it, everybody knows that

Even the most incompetent T.A. could see,

This won't be on the test, but

Take it from me,

Axiomatically,

Naturally,

A cursory glance reveals that

As luck would have it,

Through the careful use of common sense,

By the standard argument,

I hope I don’t need to explain that

According to prophecy,

Only a fool would deny that

It is almost obvious that

By method of thinking,

Through sheer force of will,

Intuitively,

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that

You of all people should realize that

The Math Gods demand that

The clever student will notice

An astute reader will have noticed that

It was once revealed to me in a dream that

Even my grandma knows that

Unless something is horribly wrong,

And now we have all we need to show that

If you use math, you can see that

It holds vacuously that

Now check this out:

Barring causality breakdown, clearly

We don't want to deprive the reader of the joy of discovering for themselves why

One of the Bernoullis probably showed that

Somebody once told me

By extrapolation,

Categorically,

If the reader is sufficiently alert, they will notice that

It’s hard not to prove that

The sophisticated reader will realize that

In this context,

It was Lebesque who first asked whether

As is tradition,

According to local folklore,

We hold these truths to be self-evident that

By simple induction,

In case you weren’t paying attention,

A poor student or a particularly clever dog will realize immediately that

Every student brought up in the American education system is told that

Most experts agree that

Sober readers see that

And would you look at that:

And lo!

By abstract nonsense,

I leave the proof to the suspicious reader that

When one stares at the equations they immediately rearrange themselves to show that

This behooves you to state that

Therefore

The heralds shall sing for generations hence that

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times,

Our forefathers built this country on the proposition that

My father told me, and his father before that, and his before that, that

As sure as the sun will rise again tomorrow morning,

The burden of proof is on my opponents to disprove that

If you ask me,

I didn’t think I would have to spell this out, but

For all we know,

Promise me you won’t tell mom, but

It would be a disservice to human intelligence to deny that

Proof of the following has been intentially omitted:

here isn’t enough space in the footnote section to prove that

Someone of your status would understand that

It would stand to reason that

Ostensibly,

The hatred of 10,000 years ensures that

There isn’t enough space in the footnote section to prove that

Simple deduction from peano’s axioms shows

By a careful change of basis we see that

Using Conway’s notation we see that

The TL;DR is that

Certainly,

Surely

An early theorem of Gauss shows that

An English major could deduce that

And Jesus said to his Apostles,

This fact may follow obviously from a theorem, but it's not obvious which theorem you're using:

Word on the streets is that

Assuming an arbitrary alignment of planets, astrology tells us

The voices insist that

Someone whispered to me on the subway yesterday that

For surely all cases,

Indeed,

(To be continued)

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

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

22 VIII 2022

I will have to give a talk soon, in a few days I'll be attending a student conference. I decided to prepare something about my latest interest, which is knot theory. what makes it so cool for me is that the visual representations are super important here, but on top of that there is this huge abstract theory and active research going on

I decided to talk about the Seifert surfaces. this topic allows to turn my whole presentation into an art project

other than that I'm studying euclidean geometry and unfortunately it is not as fun as I thought it'd be

my drawings are pretty, ik. but there is almost no theory

I had a thought that working through a topic with a textbook is a bit like playing a game. doing something like rings and modules, the game has a rich plot (the theory), and quests (exercises) are there to allow me to find out more about the universum. whereas euclidean geometry has almost no plot, consists almost solely of quests. it's funny cause I never played any game aside from chess and mine sweeper

commutative algebra turned out to be very interesting, to my surprise. I was afraid that it would be boring and dry, but actually it feels good, especially when the constructions are motivated by algebraic geometry

commalg and AG answer the question from the first course in abstract algebra: why the fuck am I supposed to care about prime and maximal ideals?

oh and I became the president of the machine learning club. this is an honor but I'm understandably aftaid that I won't do well enough

I'm stressed about the amount of responsibilities, that's what I wanted to run away from by having the holiday. good thing is I gathered so many study resources for this year that I probably won't have to worry about it anytime soon, or at least I hope so

I neglected this blog like hell, sorry

I had a lot of work to do, that's kinda what happened. but I would like to go back to posting regularly, so maybe I could write about something people would want to see?

for now my ideas for posts include

more study tips

a quick intro to moduli functors, since a lot of sources are written in a way that requires advanced algebraic geometry. I could explain the basics using (almost) only commutative algebra

updates on my life and what I've been working on

books recommendations

interesting math problems I encountered recently

if you'd like to see any of that, let me know! and feel free to give me more suggestions in the comments

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