Snippets of things that have happened
Jul. 13th, 2008 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyI think I've forgotten most of what I want to write down, though.
Utterly ridiculous game of AGoT on Friday, in which when the game got to the 9th turn or so, Josh and Gabby attempted to deliberately cause a draw so they could call it a "joint victory". Ultimately Josh managed to take advantage of the situation and win, but they started trying to figure out how they could make working joint victory rules. I think they've been playing too much Illuminati.
I know which 4 students I'm assigned to, but instead I tend to think of "my students" as the ones who actually come to me for help a lot.
Ethan seems to have started imitating me, sort of. It's very strange.
I think I am going to do a mini-course on max-flow/min-cut. I wrote out a sketch of what I want to cover, I had better start planning the details of it...
The cyclotomic fields seminars I actually understand! Yay!
Erick is beginning to make the talent show posters.
The kids this year are worrying a lot about the midterm. We repeatedly tell them not to. It may have finally sunk in.
Fried wants exploration labs to hand in some sort of outline by tomorrow. I don't know how my group's going to do that, they've found so little so far. But then, it seems to always happen that way, no?
Have I mentioned Keith Conrad's research lab? It's pretty neat. I'm not on it, of course, as I'm leading an explo lab. It goes like this - we consider the μ function on Zp[x], p≠2 which is defined the same way as the one on Z. Over Z this is hard to compute; no way is currently known other than factoring the number. But over Zp[x], p≠2, it's easy. It's just μ(f)=(-1)deg f(disc f | p), where (a|p) denotes the Legendre symbol. So you can calculate μ without doing anything like factoring. The questions presented are in 3 parts:
1. A bunch of stuff that actually proves this already-known result
2. An application of this fact, which I'll leave out for now should first-years be reading, but you can all guess what it is (This is actually presented 3rd, not second, but...)
3. So, can you do it for p=2? (This is the part that's actually unknown.)
So actually that's a bad way to set up a research lab - a bunch of stuff that's easy when it's presented to you, coupled with a single unknown question. But still pretty neat - and the students working on it actually already have a conjecture for the p=2 case. We'll see what happens.
Jake actually had his clothes stolen out of the dryer. They've got to be able to find who did it, right?
Vlad continues to attempt to poke holes in the foundations.
-Harry
Utterly ridiculous game of AGoT on Friday, in which when the game got to the 9th turn or so, Josh and Gabby attempted to deliberately cause a draw so they could call it a "joint victory". Ultimately Josh managed to take advantage of the situation and win, but they started trying to figure out how they could make working joint victory rules. I think they've been playing too much Illuminati.
I know which 4 students I'm assigned to, but instead I tend to think of "my students" as the ones who actually come to me for help a lot.
Ethan seems to have started imitating me, sort of. It's very strange.
I think I am going to do a mini-course on max-flow/min-cut. I wrote out a sketch of what I want to cover, I had better start planning the details of it...
The cyclotomic fields seminars I actually understand! Yay!
Erick is beginning to make the talent show posters.
The kids this year are worrying a lot about the midterm. We repeatedly tell them not to. It may have finally sunk in.
Fried wants exploration labs to hand in some sort of outline by tomorrow. I don't know how my group's going to do that, they've found so little so far. But then, it seems to always happen that way, no?
Have I mentioned Keith Conrad's research lab? It's pretty neat. I'm not on it, of course, as I'm leading an explo lab. It goes like this - we consider the μ function on Zp[x], p≠2 which is defined the same way as the one on Z. Over Z this is hard to compute; no way is currently known other than factoring the number. But over Zp[x], p≠2, it's easy. It's just μ(f)=(-1)deg f(disc f | p), where (a|p) denotes the Legendre symbol. So you can calculate μ without doing anything like factoring. The questions presented are in 3 parts:
1. A bunch of stuff that actually proves this already-known result
2. An application of this fact, which I'll leave out for now should first-years be reading, but you can all guess what it is (This is actually presented 3rd, not second, but...)
3. So, can you do it for p=2? (This is the part that's actually unknown.)
So actually that's a bad way to set up a research lab - a bunch of stuff that's easy when it's presented to you, coupled with a single unknown question. But still pretty neat - and the students working on it actually already have a conjecture for the p=2 case. We'll see what happens.
Jake actually had his clothes stolen out of the dryer. They've got to be able to find who did it, right?
Vlad continues to attempt to poke holes in the foundations.
-Harry
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 07:25 pm (UTC)It works over other (not characteristic 2) finite fields as well, SFAICT, but I'm guessing we can't determine quadratic character quite as easily over those. (And what they have so far about 2 seems pretty specific to just F2.)