So today apparently Annie fell down the stairs and had to be taken to the hospital. Ryan has an away message up saying simply "she's fine =)", which I suppose probably refers to her, but, as he's away, I can't be sure. ...OK, he's back, it does. Yay! So not so bad after all. And in fact he says she should be out Friday night! So really not that bad at all.
Meanwhile (or, actually, hours later, after school has ended), the Quiz Bowl team tries to organize its trip to Chicago... well, we got one thing accomplished, we decided on what the team we're sending is (me, Ben, Noam, Andy, and Emi; Chris and Josh are, of course, going to ARML; others can't go for other reasons). And, Mr. Sayres started investigating the pricing... and wow. $450 per person is his lower bound. Someone suggested other schools probably got someone to sponsor their trip, but we sure can't do that now. More like $500, actually (price especially driven up by the inclusion of Emi, as now we need a female chaperone as well, so we need *2* more rooms...). Mr. Sayres is trying to find a cheap flight to Chicago but so far he hasn't found one cheaper than $200! And all this is not including food, etc. So... yeah.
This, of course, is all assuming we can get the SAT thing worked out. Several of the people we're sending were planning to take that SAT that day, and if they can't get that moved, we don't really have a team, and we're not going. So other people are currently working on that...
Yay, my team won at QB practice today on a bunch of easy questions.
Neat math problem Dr. Nevard gave us: Prove that the maximal ideals of the ring C[0,1] (continuous functions from [0,1] to R, with the obvious addition and multiplication) are precisely the sets of the form {f:f(a)=0} for some a.
Hah, Dr. Nevard has just stopped teaching in math; he's thought about teaching Lebesgue integration, but as 5 of us are doing that - were doing that, rather, class has ended - at Columbia, no. So he says maybe he'll teach us about Fourier transforms...
He actually put 3 math problems on the board today. The first was the infamous a4 problem (if R is a ring in which a4=a ∀a∈R, prove R is commutative), but we already knew it was ridiculously hard and that we shouldn't bother attempting it. The second was the C[0,1] thing, and the third was to prove how you invert a Fourier transform, assuming that thing was a Fourier transform (which seems a safe assumption, it was certainly related to them).
...yeah, I have no ending here.
-Sniffnoy
Meanwhile (or, actually, hours later, after school has ended), the Quiz Bowl team tries to organize its trip to Chicago... well, we got one thing accomplished, we decided on what the team we're sending is (me, Ben, Noam, Andy, and Emi; Chris and Josh are, of course, going to ARML; others can't go for other reasons). And, Mr. Sayres started investigating the pricing... and wow. $450 per person is his lower bound. Someone suggested other schools probably got someone to sponsor their trip, but we sure can't do that now. More like $500, actually (price especially driven up by the inclusion of Emi, as now we need a female chaperone as well, so we need *2* more rooms...). Mr. Sayres is trying to find a cheap flight to Chicago but so far he hasn't found one cheaper than $200! And all this is not including food, etc. So... yeah.
This, of course, is all assuming we can get the SAT thing worked out. Several of the people we're sending were planning to take that SAT that day, and if they can't get that moved, we don't really have a team, and we're not going. So other people are currently working on that...
Yay, my team won at QB practice today on a bunch of easy questions.
Neat math problem Dr. Nevard gave us: Prove that the maximal ideals of the ring C[0,1] (continuous functions from [0,1] to R, with the obvious addition and multiplication) are precisely the sets of the form {f:f(a)=0} for some a.
Hah, Dr. Nevard has just stopped teaching in math; he's thought about teaching Lebesgue integration, but as 5 of us are doing that - were doing that, rather, class has ended - at Columbia, no. So he says maybe he'll teach us about Fourier transforms...
He actually put 3 math problems on the board today. The first was the infamous a4 problem (if R is a ring in which a4=a ∀a∈R, prove R is commutative), but we already knew it was ridiculously hard and that we shouldn't bother attempting it. The second was the C[0,1] thing, and the third was to prove how you invert a Fourier transform, assuming that thing was a Fourier transform (which seems a safe assumption, it was certainly related to them).
...yeah, I have no ending here.
-Sniffnoy
