I'm Glad I Never Encoutered Anyone With Such Serious Mindset While I Was Studying Programming Because

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.

I know we all have different skills and all and it's supposed to be complementary, but, people who can do math are so morbidly funny to me

I figure it must be like

Imagine being like only one of twelve people in your whole city who can read and write

And it's not just because everyone else is uneducated, most of them cannot even learn the sort of things you can learn. Or they could, in theory, but it frustrates them so much that they never make it past grade school reading tops, and they hate every second of it

And it's not a "luxury" skill, either, like your whole society needs the written word to function, and by extension, they need you. They need you for shit like reading labels and instruction manuals and writting 2 sentences letters, and they pay you handsomely for that, which is nice, but also feels absurd

You read a whole series of novels that rock your life and you can't even talk about it to your best friend because anything more complex than a picture book breaks their brain

11 II 2023

in two days I have my last exam and I have absolutely zero motivation to study for it

yesterday I had an oral complex analysis exam and I did very well, the professor said that I will most likely receive the top grade. my partial scores from this course add up to 80%, so if the oral one was for 100%, it yields 84% total. that sounds like a top grade to me although we haven't received the official report yet

I also had an algebraic methods exam a few days ago and it went ok, I completed 4.5 out of 6 problems. I probably have no chance for a top grade from this course because the professor is very strict with how many points qualify for that and I am not even close to what the best people had. this is why I have zero motivation to study for the oral exam from this course, if there was a chance to score a 5 (the top grade) then I would care, but if my options are 3.5, 4 or 4.5, I don't really see the difference

well, the difference lies in maybe applying for a scholarship after this academic year, but honestly that "goal" is just here to distract myself from feeling judged all the time. somehow I don't care about money as much as an abstract number supposedly rating my abilities so thinking of it as "try harder so you might get paid for it" feels less pressing than "try harder so you'll have higher abstract numbers and you can feel good about yourself"

jesus I fucking hate grades, I wish it was kept secret from me how much points I actually have, only receive feedback on the correctness of my solutions and the information if I am passing or not. I can never be satisfied with I am doing. last year I would see it as a success to score 4's at everything, now it feels like a failure because I already scored some 5's, so that's my new bottom line. and I know that if I did ace everything, I would be happy for about 5 minutes and then move on to picking up twice as many courses for the next semester because "it would be too easy otherwise"

grades, no matter what I'm getting, fuck with my self esteem so deeply. it brings out the worst insecurities, fears and memories, this is when I am thinking my darkest thoughts. I have no one to talk to about this and I am angry at myself for perceiving it this way. I wish these things didn't matter to me but they do, I don't even know why, it feels like a trap

I don't want people to tell me that "I'm great no matter what grades I'm getting" or that "I will do it, because I'm smart". I actually don't know what I want, and it sucks to put my friends into the situation where no matter what they say it's "the wrong line". ughhh I want this semester to be over so I can go back to only caring about learning as much as possible

my thesis advisor (I think that's what you call the thesis boss) sent me a paper to read and I'm curious what topic he picked for me. I will gladly read it right after I'm done with exams

28 V 2022

topology and analysis tests are over, both went I think alright

if I don't get 100% from topo I'm going to be very frustrated, because I studied hard and acquired deep understanding of the material – so far as to be able to hold a lecture for my classmate about any topic

analysis ughhh if I get ≥40% I will be overjoyed. but that's just the specifics of this subject, you study super hard and seem to be entirely ready, you solve all of the problems in prep and then best you can do is 40%. my best score so far was 42%, so anything more than that will be my lifetime record lmao, I want this so bad. I solved two problems entirely I think, which should give 40% already, and some pieces from two more, chances are I get 50%, which would be absolutely amazing

here are some pictures from me transforming math into an art project

stokes theorem

topology

I was thinking about how annoying I find what people say to me when I tell them that I'm not happy with how I'm doing at math. their first idea is to tell me how great I am and how all I do is good enough and shit like that. it doesn't help, it just feels like I am not being taken seriously. when I barely pass anything, am I really supposed to believe that everything is actually good? it feels like they skip getting to know my situation and just tell me what they would tell anyone, automatic

when I try to calm myself down and think something that will keep me going I don't try to force myself to be happy, fuck that, not being content with one's achievements is very fine, I believe not being happy all the time is fully natural and all that positivity feels so fake

instead what seems to work is asking myself where the rational threshold of being ok with how I'm doing is. the thing is I will never be satisfied, whatever I have, I always want more. but I can set the limits in advance and that stops me from falling into self-loathing loops

although what has really changed the game for me was getting a few good grades, finally I am achieving something, anything. people tell me that I should learn to be alright without this external reliance on achievements but how am I supposed to do that when the source of my low moods is precisely getting less than I want? I don't understand why I should brainwash myself into thinking that this is actually not what I want. the trick here is to separate the goal-orientedness from the sense of self-worth. the groundbreaking realization of mine was figuring out that I believe I deserve more than I get, that's why I am unhappy. so now that I am getting what I think what I deserve I obviously feel much better

BCC

A minimal figure-eight knot on the body-centered cubic lattice

(source code)

why is deciding on a title for my thesis so hard

parents got a new cat they named lord montague and this morning i heard my dad in the other room say "i would have to advise against that decision, my lord" followed by a crashing sound

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…

Hey, im second semester math undergrad, do you recomend any book for calculus?

hi, unfortunately for first year analysis/calculus I used mostly the resources given by the professors, however, when I did use textbooks I really liked Walter Rudin:

as far as I know, many people recommend Apostol's book, which looks very good and if I was to choose a textbook for myself right now I would definitely try this one:

other than textbooks, if you like learning math from videos check out this channel:

YouTube

Michael Penn

Math videos covering Calculus, Differential Equations, Number Theory and more

Michael Penn is a teacher at a university and he's great at explaining theory and solutions of problems

from now I’ve got to start chasing regular discomfort, because otherwise comfort isn’t comfort but stagnation. you can’t have one without the other. to be challenged is to grow and it’s the only way to actually feel at peace