Confusion and annoyance!
Jul. 2nd, 2006 08:25 pmSo I stopped by PROMYS today for a few hours during registration. If people asked me why I was there, I said, "to confuse and annoy people!" (Or, alternatively, "to confuse and annoy you!") Lucas was certainly surprised to see me. Rebecca was also there though she's not a counselor this year.
Apparently there are only 3 Dans this year, all returning (ADan, Counselor Dan, and Irrelevant Dan). Only 2 Erics, as well (Erick the K and a first-year). In fact, there's no particular name at all that there's a lot of this year.
So apparently ADan, even though he's now a third-year, still never finished problem set 0. (I.e. he never proved that the harmonic numbers are never integers past 1.) So Josh and Dustin were trying to get him to do that.
Ben Wolf was there, and I didn't remember who he was, and I was looking down the list of people and I saw his name and I turned to him and said, "Oh! You're Ben Wolf! I owe you an extension cord!" So I suppose when I return in 4 weeks I'll bring it to him. Hah, I also didn't recognize Will at first, though he was my roommate last year.
Infinity Boy is back, though Chris kept telling me not to call him that.
I took a look at the research projects. Gunnells is back with his triangles, which Rebecca and Chris are going to try to warn people away from, and he even reproposed that one that nobody wanted to do because it was just a single unsolved problem. Neatness: there's one project from Hanke about - you know about the recent 290 theorem (which he helped prove)? That if an integral quadratic form takes on these 29 values, it takes on all integral values? The idea is to find similar finite sets that ensure an integral quadratic form takes on other subsets of Z. (Apparently there's a theorem saying such a finite set always exists.)
So I was telling Josh about what I had gotten with the a^n=a problem; I get the idea now he's going to start working on it...
-Sniffnoy
Apparently there are only 3 Dans this year, all returning (ADan, Counselor Dan, and Irrelevant Dan). Only 2 Erics, as well (Erick the K and a first-year). In fact, there's no particular name at all that there's a lot of this year.
So apparently ADan, even though he's now a third-year, still never finished problem set 0. (I.e. he never proved that the harmonic numbers are never integers past 1.) So Josh and Dustin were trying to get him to do that.
Ben Wolf was there, and I didn't remember who he was, and I was looking down the list of people and I saw his name and I turned to him and said, "Oh! You're Ben Wolf! I owe you an extension cord!" So I suppose when I return in 4 weeks I'll bring it to him. Hah, I also didn't recognize Will at first, though he was my roommate last year.
Infinity Boy is back, though Chris kept telling me not to call him that.
I took a look at the research projects. Gunnells is back with his triangles, which Rebecca and Chris are going to try to warn people away from, and he even reproposed that one that nobody wanted to do because it was just a single unsolved problem. Neatness: there's one project from Hanke about - you know about the recent 290 theorem (which he helped prove)? That if an integral quadratic form takes on these 29 values, it takes on all integral values? The idea is to find similar finite sets that ensure an integral quadratic form takes on other subsets of Z. (Apparently there's a theorem saying such a finite set always exists.)
So I was telling Josh about what I had gotten with the a^n=a problem; I get the idea now he's going to start working on it...
-Sniffnoy
