HOW DO UNICORNS HAVE ANY BEARING ON THIS!
Jul. 18th, 2005 07:48 pmSo today we got back our first zeta problem set. At one point on it I had made a note to myself to rigorize a certain step (a sum-limit switch) (I never did), perhaps by somehow showing uniform convergence. I abbreviated this "Unicon?". I never thought to erase this, and I had written it pretty small, so when I got it back today, it had the title of this entry written right below it.
Rohrlich: I want to reserve this [the notation Zp] for the ring of p-adic integers, which is basically what you get when you take the integers mod p and put them on steroids.
So today we had our second guest lecture, and I do not exaggerate when I say that it was almost certainly among the worst ever given here at PROMYS. It was called "The Power of Maybe" and given by Carl Monash, I believe his name was. When Chris saw the title he immediately thought of quantum computing; Tom thought of probability. In fact it was about... nothing. Or, it was supposed to be about Game Theory. It was Carl Monash going on and on about what was neat about game theory and how it was being used, and doing some neat little games as examples of weirdness of it, and him saying about how long it's been since he's done any math, and him, well, not actually doing any math. He was going to *state* some min-max theorem at the end, but he ran far over time and didn't even get to that. It was all very boring except for his neat little example games, all of which consisted of variations on the idea of auctioning off a dollar bill. And there it was really just neat to see what people did. I think he was really just making up the lecture as he went along - partly because it really appeared that way, and partly because he actually said at one point, "I"m making this up as I go along." Gah. Let's hope for some better ones sometime soon before the first-years get the idea that guest lectures are bad.
-Sniffnoy
Rohrlich: I want to reserve this [the notation Zp] for the ring of p-adic integers, which is basically what you get when you take the integers mod p and put them on steroids.
So today we had our second guest lecture, and I do not exaggerate when I say that it was almost certainly among the worst ever given here at PROMYS. It was called "The Power of Maybe" and given by Carl Monash, I believe his name was. When Chris saw the title he immediately thought of quantum computing; Tom thought of probability. In fact it was about... nothing. Or, it was supposed to be about Game Theory. It was Carl Monash going on and on about what was neat about game theory and how it was being used, and doing some neat little games as examples of weirdness of it, and him saying about how long it's been since he's done any math, and him, well, not actually doing any math. He was going to *state* some min-max theorem at the end, but he ran far over time and didn't even get to that. It was all very boring except for his neat little example games, all of which consisted of variations on the idea of auctioning off a dollar bill. And there it was really just neat to see what people did. I think he was really just making up the lecture as he went along - partly because it really appeared that way, and partly because he actually said at one point, "I"m making this up as I go along." Gah. Let's hope for some better ones sometime soon before the first-years get the idea that guest lectures are bad.
-Sniffnoy
