It's now been a week since Friday
Aug. 4th, 2004 05:08 pmSo, Friday. Let's see what I remember of it.
So Thursday at the end of lecture Bernie goes up in front and goes:
"Do you like to dance? I don't care!"
...because of course tomorrow's Mandatory Fun is the dance. (They do the skit on Friday, too, although Cameron's not there this time.)
After lecture on Friday was the picture. After the picture we're returning to Towers when we see this sculpture - this abstract sort of thing - which looks suspiciously like it contains a (nontrivial) knot. First we found a (nontrivial) link in it, which was easy. Then we started looking for a knot, and also looking at its graph structure. Let's see, it's 3-regular, it has 9 vertices - what? Oh, OK, there's the 10th. Hey, it's the Petersen graph! No it's not, it contains a 3-cycle. Eventually Dan found the trefoil knot in it. Everyone else went back while I stayed to take down the actual graph structure of it.
A bit before dinner, when I started feeling nauseous. I went down to dinner, put down my backpack, and realized I was going to throw up. I told the door-card-thingy-person that I was going to the bathroom. Which is where I went, I just didn't come back afterward. Because while in there I proceeded to throw up (who would have guessed?) (including on my shoes), and then, out of a lack of anything better to do, went back up to my room and went to sleep.
When I woke up I went downstairs to Franklin lounge - with no shoes, obviously - and found that yay, people had brought my backpack up from the cafeteria! I also found that it was almost time for Mandatory Fun and I hadn't eaten yet. So I went to Burger King and was relieved to find that they don't require you to wear shoes there.
So, Mandatory Fun. Bernie sat in one corner, controlling the music. I don't really know much of what else happened on that side of the room; I didn't go there often. I do remember that at first the entire dance floor (the part of the cafeteria with tables cleared out of the way) was taken up by people throwing some sort of big orange ball at each other.
On the other side of the room, there was another source of music (which sounded rather weird from where I was, as you could hear both): Evan had set up a DDR game.
The Illuminati game I won't describe, I'll upload the final power structures later (they were great), Mafia that night I won't bother to describe, as Etienne has already done so in Pinyan's LJ and better than I possibly could.
Saturday - I wake up. I get up. I feel nauseous. I go back to bed. I wait. I get up again. I feel nauseous again. I go back to ged again. Repeat several times. I feel nauseous *in* bed. I run to the bathroom. I vomit blood. I get rushed to the hospital, where I stay until Wednesday. Hence the large gap in my postings.
My stay at the hospital was... mostly boring. I got no work done there - I tried to do a bit with trees, but got nowhere. Bernie had come with me and said perhaps we should try constructing formal negatives of trees, but I tried it and couldn't get it to work, due to a distinct lack of commutativity. If it can somehow be done without that, I don't know.
The first day they actually stuck an NG tube in me. An NG tube is a tube that goes up your nose, down your esophagus, and into your stomach.
They said it was going to be unpleasant.
It was probably the most torturous experience I have had within memory.
And they left it in till the next day.
Other than that it was pretty much unremarkable, so I won't bore you with it. Wednesday I stop off at my cousins' house in Lexington, my parents (who came up from New Jersey when they heard) went home, and I came back to find the Towers deserted.
Eventually I realized there had to be a guest lecture, so I headed to Stone B50, and got there just as it ended, where Anton proceeded to poke me repeatedly to confirm that I was really there.
Thursday (Yesterday). Yes, I'm rushing through this. (And probably missing things. Oh well.)
QR was finally conjectured in lecture. Oh, something else in lecture that I apparently slept through. (Not exact words.) "So say we've got Z[i]g. How many g-units are there?" ...which must have been deliberate, else why would he have used g?
Yesterday was also Etienne's lecture on really basic stuff about rational points on elliptic curves. Once he defined how to add two points on an elliptic curve, and stated that it was a group, he wrote down the group properties and started proving them.
1. Closure.
2. Identity.
3. Inverses.
4. Ass.
He proceeded to note how we had already proven 1, show that 2 and 3 are trivial, but as for 4 - "Well, this one is kind of hard." Everybody laughs. Etienne doesn't get it. "Here, I'm going to draw a picture." Everybody laughs. Etienne doesn't get it. Xiao points out that his graph of y²=x³ is already something of a picture of that. (Graph it.) Everybody laughs. Etienne doesn't get it.
After that was Demeter's lecture on Ramsey numbers, which seemed rather interesting but was presented very boringly and so I left halfway through as I was nearly sleeping. I also got my leg stuck under an arm of a chair. I try to get up and suddenly I notice that my left leg is hurting, and, furthermore, it's stuck. I immediately cry out, "Help! My leg's stuck!", sort of interrupting the lecture. Everyone rushes over but nobody really does anything until Etienne frees it.
Justin tells me to do problem 10 on the number theory. I get that it holds under this really weird condition. I think there must be a better way to do the problem; I go showing people my weird condition. Evan looks at it. "That's wrong. There's still powers of an in there." Oh, whoops. Fix fix fix... hey, now I've got the *derivative* of f in there! I *definitely* must have messed up. Plus now my condition is much less nice. Then the correct form appears as P9 on today's pset... gyah! Not only does it only work if p does not divide f'(a), I was very close to proving that!
Oh, apparently there actually was a Southern Tenant Farmers' Union from 1934 to 1960.
Today. Etienne arrives at lecture wearing a dress and a hat that says "PWNED" in big letters. The explanation is... strange, and I will leave that to someone else, or perhaps just another entry, as I am running out of time before Fandatory Mun.
QR appears in its more compact form.
After lecture, I do P9, then I go to sleep until lunch. The counselors are telling me I was just sick, I should get more sleep, so I do so.
Paul Gunnells was here to give a lecture at 16:00, so at 14:30, the Gunnells groups go over to Stone B50 to ask him questions about our labs.
Ramanujan graphs - They say how they've not really gotten anywhere, and they ask him what the motivation for the definition of a Ramanujan graph is anyway.
He goes into a long explanation with weird theorems he can't proves and finally, after a long time, arrives at the motivation for the definition.
So, yeah, the Ramanujan graphs groups is doing something that's already been covered pretty extensively. Hoo-ray. They're just looking at it from a *slightly* different angle from the normal one.
Arithmetree - We tell Gunnells about our progress as he acts (or rather, is) generally clueless. He really doesn't know anything about this thing, he just kind of saw it, said "Hey, this looks neat", and threw it out there for us to play around with. Hoo-ray.
Theta Sequences! This is the big one. It turns out that these "theta sequences" are just a name Paul Gunnells made up for a special case of Poincare Series, with the result that the group was misled into thinking that they were actually doing something new when they could not find any literature on it. Apparently there's already a known general algorithm for it! Of course it's really nasty so they're actually doing something by finding better formulas for these special cases, but still... they're going to complain about this to Cameron.
So, two problems that are already pretty well-covered, and one that Gunnells doesn't actually know anything about. Hoo-ray. Oh yeah, and Lattice Sets, which nobody actually did, but which somebody did last year.
Then Gunnells's lecture, which for some strange reason I cannot quite remember. No, I was not asleep! Ah yes. There was one thing about how it's easy to prove Fermat's Last Theorem in C[x], but not in Z, because Z doesn't have derivatives. So of course after that Chris and Eric and Rebbecca and I were all trying to come up with bizarre definitions for the derivative of an integer, or at least of a whole number or at least of a natural number.
I suggested you write it out in base 2, as a polynomial in 2, differentiate that, and then plug 2 back in. Chris suggested you turn the unique prime factorization into a polynomial - the power of 2 is the constant term, the power of 3 is the x term, etc. Then you differentiate that and convert back. I don't remember the other suggestions. None of these are really all that nice. :P (4 is its own derivative! :D )
...that pretty much catches me up to the present, except of course for all the things I left out due to my being in a hurry and having been in the hospital for several days.
-Sniffnoy
--
"ASCLEPIUS - Also known as ASKLEPIOS and AESCULAPIUS, depending
whether you are Greek, Roman or dyslexic."
-Godchecker.com
So Thursday at the end of lecture Bernie goes up in front and goes:
"Do you like to dance? I don't care!"
...because of course tomorrow's Mandatory Fun is the dance. (They do the skit on Friday, too, although Cameron's not there this time.)
After lecture on Friday was the picture. After the picture we're returning to Towers when we see this sculpture - this abstract sort of thing - which looks suspiciously like it contains a (nontrivial) knot. First we found a (nontrivial) link in it, which was easy. Then we started looking for a knot, and also looking at its graph structure. Let's see, it's 3-regular, it has 9 vertices - what? Oh, OK, there's the 10th. Hey, it's the Petersen graph! No it's not, it contains a 3-cycle. Eventually Dan found the trefoil knot in it. Everyone else went back while I stayed to take down the actual graph structure of it.
A bit before dinner, when I started feeling nauseous. I went down to dinner, put down my backpack, and realized I was going to throw up. I told the door-card-thingy-person that I was going to the bathroom. Which is where I went, I just didn't come back afterward. Because while in there I proceeded to throw up (who would have guessed?) (including on my shoes), and then, out of a lack of anything better to do, went back up to my room and went to sleep.
When I woke up I went downstairs to Franklin lounge - with no shoes, obviously - and found that yay, people had brought my backpack up from the cafeteria! I also found that it was almost time for Mandatory Fun and I hadn't eaten yet. So I went to Burger King and was relieved to find that they don't require you to wear shoes there.
So, Mandatory Fun. Bernie sat in one corner, controlling the music. I don't really know much of what else happened on that side of the room; I didn't go there often. I do remember that at first the entire dance floor (the part of the cafeteria with tables cleared out of the way) was taken up by people throwing some sort of big orange ball at each other.
On the other side of the room, there was another source of music (which sounded rather weird from where I was, as you could hear both): Evan had set up a DDR game.
The Illuminati game I won't describe, I'll upload the final power structures later (they were great), Mafia that night I won't bother to describe, as Etienne has already done so in Pinyan's LJ and better than I possibly could.
Saturday - I wake up. I get up. I feel nauseous. I go back to bed. I wait. I get up again. I feel nauseous again. I go back to ged again. Repeat several times. I feel nauseous *in* bed. I run to the bathroom. I vomit blood. I get rushed to the hospital, where I stay until Wednesday. Hence the large gap in my postings.
My stay at the hospital was... mostly boring. I got no work done there - I tried to do a bit with trees, but got nowhere. Bernie had come with me and said perhaps we should try constructing formal negatives of trees, but I tried it and couldn't get it to work, due to a distinct lack of commutativity. If it can somehow be done without that, I don't know.
The first day they actually stuck an NG tube in me. An NG tube is a tube that goes up your nose, down your esophagus, and into your stomach.
They said it was going to be unpleasant.
It was probably the most torturous experience I have had within memory.
And they left it in till the next day.
Other than that it was pretty much unremarkable, so I won't bore you with it. Wednesday I stop off at my cousins' house in Lexington, my parents (who came up from New Jersey when they heard) went home, and I came back to find the Towers deserted.
Eventually I realized there had to be a guest lecture, so I headed to Stone B50, and got there just as it ended, where Anton proceeded to poke me repeatedly to confirm that I was really there.
Thursday (Yesterday). Yes, I'm rushing through this. (And probably missing things. Oh well.)
QR was finally conjectured in lecture. Oh, something else in lecture that I apparently slept through. (Not exact words.) "So say we've got Z[i]g. How many g-units are there?" ...which must have been deliberate, else why would he have used g?
Yesterday was also Etienne's lecture on really basic stuff about rational points on elliptic curves. Once he defined how to add two points on an elliptic curve, and stated that it was a group, he wrote down the group properties and started proving them.
1. Closure.
2. Identity.
3. Inverses.
4. Ass.
He proceeded to note how we had already proven 1, show that 2 and 3 are trivial, but as for 4 - "Well, this one is kind of hard." Everybody laughs. Etienne doesn't get it. "Here, I'm going to draw a picture." Everybody laughs. Etienne doesn't get it. Xiao points out that his graph of y²=x³ is already something of a picture of that. (Graph it.) Everybody laughs. Etienne doesn't get it.
After that was Demeter's lecture on Ramsey numbers, which seemed rather interesting but was presented very boringly and so I left halfway through as I was nearly sleeping. I also got my leg stuck under an arm of a chair. I try to get up and suddenly I notice that my left leg is hurting, and, furthermore, it's stuck. I immediately cry out, "Help! My leg's stuck!", sort of interrupting the lecture. Everyone rushes over but nobody really does anything until Etienne frees it.
Justin tells me to do problem 10 on the number theory. I get that it holds under this really weird condition. I think there must be a better way to do the problem; I go showing people my weird condition. Evan looks at it. "That's wrong. There's still powers of an in there." Oh, whoops. Fix fix fix... hey, now I've got the *derivative* of f in there! I *definitely* must have messed up. Plus now my condition is much less nice. Then the correct form appears as P9 on today's pset... gyah! Not only does it only work if p does not divide f'(a), I was very close to proving that!
Oh, apparently there actually was a Southern Tenant Farmers' Union from 1934 to 1960.
Today. Etienne arrives at lecture wearing a dress and a hat that says "PWNED" in big letters. The explanation is... strange, and I will leave that to someone else, or perhaps just another entry, as I am running out of time before Fandatory Mun.
QR appears in its more compact form.
After lecture, I do P9, then I go to sleep until lunch. The counselors are telling me I was just sick, I should get more sleep, so I do so.
Paul Gunnells was here to give a lecture at 16:00, so at 14:30, the Gunnells groups go over to Stone B50 to ask him questions about our labs.
Ramanujan graphs - They say how they've not really gotten anywhere, and they ask him what the motivation for the definition of a Ramanujan graph is anyway.
He goes into a long explanation with weird theorems he can't proves and finally, after a long time, arrives at the motivation for the definition.
So, yeah, the Ramanujan graphs groups is doing something that's already been covered pretty extensively. Hoo-ray. They're just looking at it from a *slightly* different angle from the normal one.
Arithmetree - We tell Gunnells about our progress as he acts (or rather, is) generally clueless. He really doesn't know anything about this thing, he just kind of saw it, said "Hey, this looks neat", and threw it out there for us to play around with. Hoo-ray.
Theta Sequences! This is the big one. It turns out that these "theta sequences" are just a name Paul Gunnells made up for a special case of Poincare Series, with the result that the group was misled into thinking that they were actually doing something new when they could not find any literature on it. Apparently there's already a known general algorithm for it! Of course it's really nasty so they're actually doing something by finding better formulas for these special cases, but still... they're going to complain about this to Cameron.
So, two problems that are already pretty well-covered, and one that Gunnells doesn't actually know anything about. Hoo-ray. Oh yeah, and Lattice Sets, which nobody actually did, but which somebody did last year.
Then Gunnells's lecture, which for some strange reason I cannot quite remember. No, I was not asleep! Ah yes. There was one thing about how it's easy to prove Fermat's Last Theorem in C[x], but not in Z, because Z doesn't have derivatives. So of course after that Chris and Eric and Rebbecca and I were all trying to come up with bizarre definitions for the derivative of an integer, or at least of a whole number or at least of a natural number.
I suggested you write it out in base 2, as a polynomial in 2, differentiate that, and then plug 2 back in. Chris suggested you turn the unique prime factorization into a polynomial - the power of 2 is the constant term, the power of 3 is the x term, etc. Then you differentiate that and convert back. I don't remember the other suggestions. None of these are really all that nice. :P (4 is its own derivative! :D )
...that pretty much catches me up to the present, except of course for all the things I left out due to my being in a hurry and having been in the hospital for several days.
-Sniffnoy
--
"ASCLEPIUS - Also known as ASKLEPIOS and AESCULAPIUS, depending
whether you are Greek, Roman or dyslexic."
-Godchecker.com
