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sniffnoyToday he compared number theory to Quidditch. This quote is approximate: "You want to get the ball - the Quaffle, is it called? - through the hoop, and not go around in circles like that circular reasoning thing."
(Prior to the lecture, Fergie had drawn on one of the back boards the words "Circular reasoning works because", going in a circle.)
Rohrlich, when I pointed out he had referred to *the* antiderivative of a function: "I have committed the unpardonable crime... if any of you have a tape recorder, you could turn me in."
So it seems all the research labs this year, with the possible exception of the continuation of last year's triangles lab, are either really easy or really hard. Paul Gunnells continues to crank out crappy research topics, only 4 of this time; one of them consists of a single question, which is unsolved. Thankfully, nobody is doing that one.
I'm in Integral-Valued Polynomials. It's about polynomials f for which f(Z)⊂Z, which does not imply f∈Z[x] (for instance, f(x)=x(x-1)/2). Of course, in the packet, he not only told us the major result - the classification of the integral-valued polynomials - he went and practically proved it for us. So the next big question on there, then, is to explore the periodicity of these things mod p. After just one hour of computation (computer-aided, admittedly), I have a pretty good conjecture about it... I didn't start on a proof, sure, but the pattern is pretty clear...
-Sniffnoy
(Prior to the lecture, Fergie had drawn on one of the back boards the words "Circular reasoning works because", going in a circle.)
Rohrlich, when I pointed out he had referred to *the* antiderivative of a function: "I have committed the unpardonable crime... if any of you have a tape recorder, you could turn me in."
So it seems all the research labs this year, with the possible exception of the continuation of last year's triangles lab, are either really easy or really hard. Paul Gunnells continues to crank out crappy research topics, only 4 of this time; one of them consists of a single question, which is unsolved. Thankfully, nobody is doing that one.
I'm in Integral-Valued Polynomials. It's about polynomials f for which f(Z)⊂Z, which does not imply f∈Z[x] (for instance, f(x)=x(x-1)/2). Of course, in the packet, he not only told us the major result - the classification of the integral-valued polynomials - he went and practically proved it for us. So the next big question on there, then, is to explore the periodicity of these things mod p. After just one hour of computation (computer-aided, admittedly), I have a pretty good conjecture about it... I didn't start on a proof, sure, but the pattern is pretty clear...
-Sniffnoy
