February 2012
17 posts
Aaaaaah
I have too many things to do! Reading the paper, and the other paper, and studying for the exam, and doing the homework, and the other homework, and grading the assignment, and the other assignment, and figuring out the question I failed to answer in office hours, and studying up on what my students are learning next week.
Aaaaaaaah!
What's yellow, sour, and equivalent to the axiom...
Zorn’s lemon!
Hee hee.
Thanks AMS, and thanks fellow grad student who pointed these out to me.
Mathematical Folk Humor →
Well-categorized funny. Contains a brief reference to the old lemming myth, though.
Mathematician in the Woods
Long ago we postered Brown classroom and library buildings with a mysterious poster. It had an image of a forest and the text “Math in the Woods / Take breaks, make breakthroughs.” We had a vision of a group of mathy folks hanging out together someplace nice, maybe doing math sometimes and maybe taking breaks sometimes. A few cool kids got excited about it, but it never got off the...
Clustering
As part of my whole figuring out what to do with my mathematical life quest, I’m talking to a professor about his research area. He gave me an introductory paper on spectral clustering to get started. This is very much an applied math kind of thing I’m looking into here, with an applied math kind of professor, and I’ve always been a bit afraid that if I go into something...
Looks like yes
It seems like a field can be isomorphic to a proper subfield of itself, but it has to have infinite “transcendence degree” and I don’t know what that is.
I have a strong hunch my field doesn’t have it though.
Come now
Okay. Can a field be isomorphic to a proper subfield of itself? No way, right? I mean. No way. Right?
Furthermore can any ring be isomorphic to a proper subring? Such a shame the only ring I ever think about has none.
Love and Tensor Algebra →
I had already been outdone before I started.
What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a...
You can’t cross a vector with a scalar!
Happy Tensortine’s Day everybody.
For Matthew--happy Tensortine's Day
Some functions are tensors,
some functions are not.
Some boys like category theory,
and those boys are hot.
For Matthew--happy Tensortine's Day
The tensor product’s a functor
the fundamental group is, too.
It’s hard to do math
when I’m thinking of you.
For Matthew--happy Tensortine's Day
Roses are red,
tensors are bilinear,
you’d be just as cute
if you got fatter or skinnier.
I wrote a breakup song. About math and fingernails...
101 uses for Lang's Algebra →
In further celebration of my switching into algebra. This comic is delightful (and delightfully yellow).
Algebra
Homework o homework I am getting you done, you are not so bad after all! (Sorry, Shell Silverstein.)
I switched classes this semester, from modeling (the reason I posted some fun physics-y stuff in the past several months) to algebra. The decision was about teaching style much more than subject matter, and I’m bummed not to be working on my grossly underdeveloped applied math and analysis...
Inspired by unitdyfurrows, I reminisce
A friend wrote this about her life, which is really super different from my life. But it resonates with me, and I hope she doesn’t mind my responding to it with a story about me.
What she writes reminds me of how I felt when I dropped out of school. From inside my life, it was so clear that dropping out was best for me, and yet everyone around me was convinced I was making a huge...
