First day of presentations
Aug. 9th, 2005 06:24 pmFirst, some stuff I forgot.
One of the vending machines is broken. The guards have put up a sign on it. Rather than "Out of order" or "Do not use", this sign says, "DON'T DO IT!"
We've made some changes to Dustin slave time - to prevent him from getting out of singing Barbie Girl, we're going to have him do that *first*, and he's going to have to do all this with no pants on.
Yesterday Eric the Red suggested that a really cool name would be "Anton Fire", and that Anton should change his name to that.
CORRECTION: I mistakenly originally wrote that ADan suggested this.
OK, so as for the presentations...
Now, I've been telling everyone for the past few days that ours would be awful. Firstly, I said, I'm going to be the anyone who's actually going to speak loudly enough to be intelligible. Secondly, it seems nobody else in the group has any understanding of the relative importance or triviality of what we're presenting.
Consider a polynomial written in the form f(x)=sum as i goes from 0 to d of ai(x choose i). What's Δf? By Pascal's identity, it's obviously just sum as i goes from 0 to d-1 of ai+1(x choose i), i.e., you just shift the coefficients down and drop the constant term.
This is neat. This is cool. This is also trivial, and, in fact, it's well known. If you like, you can go on for a while about its importance, but don't make it sound like a profound result.
Now let's plug in 0 to Δkf. As f(0) is just the constant term, clearly Δkf(0)=ak. OK. This is not as general as the previous result, but it's a bit cooler; however, it's still trivial (and also well known).
Now let's take Δdf(0), or in fact just Δdf(n), as Δdf is, by the above, clearly constant; this is, therefore, ad, which is also equal to bdd!, where the bi is the coefficient of xi when we write it that way. This is still trivial, but unlike the previous two results, there's nothing particularly cool about it. It's really pretty pointless by itself, and it's certainly not a result to be emphasized above the previous two. But I just knew that the other members of my group would do just that, and make it sound like a profound result as well. This is because they were just investigating successive differences experimentally and found that Δdf(n)=bdd!, and thought this was really cool, while I was trying to tell them to just put their polynomials in binomial coefficient form and they wouldn't listen. Thus, in the presentation, they would do the two cool results as *lemmas* just to prove that one pointless result. Argh!
Well, today we did our actual presentation, and I have to say, I was wrong on the first point. Even Man-Yu seemed to manage a good volume. However, the rest of my group still has not learned, firstly, to present trivial results as trivial, and secondly, which results are more important than others! The worst part is, all this successive differences stuff is only tangentially related to our lab, which is really integral-valued polynomials. Blech.
The other lab groups presenting today were the Continued Fractions group, which reported that they hadn't really found anything at all, but did so much better than we did, and the first of the two Tropical Algebraic Geometry group, which was not so good. Tan Dan started it off with a whole irrelevant thing about choose functions in the tropical semiring, which he did because he apparently didn't realize that in the tropical semiring, (x+y)n=xn+yn (i.e., n·min(x,y)=min(nx,ny)). They had done their presentation in Powerpoint, and apparently the file had gotten corrupted, so they had to use an old version, with mistakes and typos in it. When it came to the actual problems the packet asked about, they didn't have much to say.
An interesting thing that occured while they were trying to set up the computers for this: They're looking for someone else's computer to use, and Fergie volunteers his. Ila points out to him that he had better change the wallpaper before they put it on the screen, where everyone can see it... Fergie shouts "oh crap!" and runs down to his laptop and goes to change the wallpaper. I go down to see what it is - last I saw it was just some comics - and, indeed, it still is just some comics. Of course, when it actually gets projected up there, it has been changed to a suggestive picture of two anime girls. :P
Still to come, on Friday: 4-numbers game (what I'm definitely thinking I should have picked... or maybe not, we'll see), this year's hyperbolic triangles group, and, of course, the other tropical algebraic geometry group.
-Sniffnoy
One of the vending machines is broken. The guards have put up a sign on it. Rather than "Out of order" or "Do not use", this sign says, "DON'T DO IT!"
We've made some changes to Dustin slave time - to prevent him from getting out of singing Barbie Girl, we're going to have him do that *first*, and he's going to have to do all this with no pants on.
Yesterday Eric the Red suggested that a really cool name would be "Anton Fire", and that Anton should change his name to that.
CORRECTION: I mistakenly originally wrote that ADan suggested this.
OK, so as for the presentations...
Now, I've been telling everyone for the past few days that ours would be awful. Firstly, I said, I'm going to be the anyone who's actually going to speak loudly enough to be intelligible. Secondly, it seems nobody else in the group has any understanding of the relative importance or triviality of what we're presenting.
Consider a polynomial written in the form f(x)=sum as i goes from 0 to d of ai(x choose i). What's Δf? By Pascal's identity, it's obviously just sum as i goes from 0 to d-1 of ai+1(x choose i), i.e., you just shift the coefficients down and drop the constant term.
This is neat. This is cool. This is also trivial, and, in fact, it's well known. If you like, you can go on for a while about its importance, but don't make it sound like a profound result.
Now let's plug in 0 to Δkf. As f(0) is just the constant term, clearly Δkf(0)=ak. OK. This is not as general as the previous result, but it's a bit cooler; however, it's still trivial (and also well known).
Now let's take Δdf(0), or in fact just Δdf(n), as Δdf is, by the above, clearly constant; this is, therefore, ad, which is also equal to bdd!, where the bi is the coefficient of xi when we write it that way. This is still trivial, but unlike the previous two results, there's nothing particularly cool about it. It's really pretty pointless by itself, and it's certainly not a result to be emphasized above the previous two. But I just knew that the other members of my group would do just that, and make it sound like a profound result as well. This is because they were just investigating successive differences experimentally and found that Δdf(n)=bdd!, and thought this was really cool, while I was trying to tell them to just put their polynomials in binomial coefficient form and they wouldn't listen. Thus, in the presentation, they would do the two cool results as *lemmas* just to prove that one pointless result. Argh!
Well, today we did our actual presentation, and I have to say, I was wrong on the first point. Even Man-Yu seemed to manage a good volume. However, the rest of my group still has not learned, firstly, to present trivial results as trivial, and secondly, which results are more important than others! The worst part is, all this successive differences stuff is only tangentially related to our lab, which is really integral-valued polynomials. Blech.
The other lab groups presenting today were the Continued Fractions group, which reported that they hadn't really found anything at all, but did so much better than we did, and the first of the two Tropical Algebraic Geometry group, which was not so good. Tan Dan started it off with a whole irrelevant thing about choose functions in the tropical semiring, which he did because he apparently didn't realize that in the tropical semiring, (x+y)n=xn+yn (i.e., n·min(x,y)=min(nx,ny)). They had done their presentation in Powerpoint, and apparently the file had gotten corrupted, so they had to use an old version, with mistakes and typos in it. When it came to the actual problems the packet asked about, they didn't have much to say.
An interesting thing that occured while they were trying to set up the computers for this: They're looking for someone else's computer to use, and Fergie volunteers his. Ila points out to him that he had better change the wallpaper before they put it on the screen, where everyone can see it... Fergie shouts "oh crap!" and runs down to his laptop and goes to change the wallpaper. I go down to see what it is - last I saw it was just some comics - and, indeed, it still is just some comics. Of course, when it actually gets projected up there, it has been changed to a suggestive picture of two anime girls. :P
Still to come, on Friday: 4-numbers game (what I'm definitely thinking I should have picked... or maybe not, we'll see), this year's hyperbolic triangles group, and, of course, the other tropical algebraic geometry group.
-Sniffnoy
