ABCDEFGHRIJKLMNOPSTUVWQXYZ
Jul. 29th, 2005 07:15 pmInfinity-boy continues to waste people's time in Number Theory. Today when Glenn mentioned that Euler conjectured the rules for 3 and 5 being a QR, ∞-boy raised his hand and asked, "Didn't Euler solve the Königsberg bridge problem?"
Today we had another guest lecture, considerably better than the last two - this one was given by Kiran Kedlaya. He had just given a talk to a bunch of high-school teachers on elliptic curves, so he figured he would reuse it. Of course, the result was that it contained nothing in the way of proofs, but it was well presented, and presumably actually interesting to those who hadn't heard of elliptic curves. (Also, ∞-boy didn't speak a word.)
There was one point that I really wanted to make a sound effect during that lecture, but I didn't, for obvious reasons - when he mentioned that an elliptic curve goes "screaming off to infinity." I made it later, during dinner; I think it was very close to the original "going over the edge" sound effect.
I also get the "obvious comment" award for that lecture - he was saying how you could get a bijection between the unit circle and the set of lines through (-1,0) by mapping each line to the other point it intersected (to (-1,0) itself in the case of the tangent); he then wrote this down explicitly in terms of the slope of the line (assuming the line was not vertical, of course), and asked if the result looked familiar. Looking at the formula, I said, "It looks sort of like a stereographic projection..." Too late, of course, I realized that it actually *was* a stereographic projection, in two dimensions. He had actually been thinking of integrating by substituting tan(x/2).
So as I wrote about before but didn't go into much detail on, the big theorem that the first years don't know about is being referred to by us by, well, random sequences of consecutive letters (or ocassionally nonconsecutive letters (or occasonally letters consecutive in the modified alphabet[0])) or occasionally by the name "James Bond" (I don't feel like explaining that one right now), and, at dinner today, I happened to refer to it as LMNOP - a bit later, I referred to it as just "LMNO". "Just LMNO?" someone asked. "Yes," I answered, "LMNO. Last Minute Non-Acronym, where the O doesn't stand for 'Acronym'."
From last night:
Tom: ADan, do you know about furries?
ADan: Only what I learned in Rohrlich's class...
[silence, confusion]
[I think this was Tom]: Not Fourier series, ADan, furries!
-Sniffnoy
[0]See the title of this entry.
Today we had another guest lecture, considerably better than the last two - this one was given by Kiran Kedlaya. He had just given a talk to a bunch of high-school teachers on elliptic curves, so he figured he would reuse it. Of course, the result was that it contained nothing in the way of proofs, but it was well presented, and presumably actually interesting to those who hadn't heard of elliptic curves. (Also, ∞-boy didn't speak a word.)
There was one point that I really wanted to make a sound effect during that lecture, but I didn't, for obvious reasons - when he mentioned that an elliptic curve goes "screaming off to infinity." I made it later, during dinner; I think it was very close to the original "going over the edge" sound effect.
I also get the "obvious comment" award for that lecture - he was saying how you could get a bijection between the unit circle and the set of lines through (-1,0) by mapping each line to the other point it intersected (to (-1,0) itself in the case of the tangent); he then wrote this down explicitly in terms of the slope of the line (assuming the line was not vertical, of course), and asked if the result looked familiar. Looking at the formula, I said, "It looks sort of like a stereographic projection..." Too late, of course, I realized that it actually *was* a stereographic projection, in two dimensions. He had actually been thinking of integrating by substituting tan(x/2).
So as I wrote about before but didn't go into much detail on, the big theorem that the first years don't know about is being referred to by us by, well, random sequences of consecutive letters (or ocassionally nonconsecutive letters (or occasonally letters consecutive in the modified alphabet[0])) or occasionally by the name "James Bond" (I don't feel like explaining that one right now), and, at dinner today, I happened to refer to it as LMNOP - a bit later, I referred to it as just "LMNO". "Just LMNO?" someone asked. "Yes," I answered, "LMNO. Last Minute Non-Acronym, where the O doesn't stand for 'Acronym'."
From last night:
Tom: ADan, do you know about furries?
ADan: Only what I learned in Rohrlich's class...
[silence, confusion]
[I think this was Tom]: Not Fourier series, ADan, furries!
-Sniffnoy
[0]See the title of this entry.
