In other news, Miklos is at a conference this week. This means various things to me, but really one important thing - we didn't have a NEW assignment due this week in class. Instead, it was suggested that we spend the weekend typing up revisions of our old assignments. As I may have mentioned before, in Spectral Theory, we write up proofs for an assignment, turn them in via email (fancy math programming - well, not all that fancy, but seeing as I'm still quite new to it, I feel fancy whenever I do it) a few days before class and then during class, get them handed back and see what we did wrong, and those who had the proofs right (or at least mostly) go up and present them for the rest of us. So, the tech copies we have so far are the uncorrected versions, and this kind of correction takes a while. For example, to get the humble vector brackets to appear around something modest, like: <x/2, 5y>, in LaTex (the programming language), one has to type:
\langle \frac{x}{2}, 5y \rangle
As you might imagine (with computers being as brilliant as they are) every time I accidentally typed 'angel' instead of 'angle', I spent twenty minutes finding the error that was keeping my document from compiling. Basically, once you are fairly fluent at it, this language makes creating typed math documents much, much easier (for articles, journals, books, - and homework, sometimes). And look how nice it ends up!
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| (who knows if I will have readers this picky, but about two thirds down, YES 'a' can be negative - it should read a=/=0. Haven't fixed that bit yet. :) ) |
I'm still new at it, so I'm not the greatest - my spacing is still sometimes wonky, and I know there are things you can do to make everything that much more neat, or fancy, or whatever- but still! Five weeks ago, I couldn't do this at all, so progress has been made!
As I was going back and editing my assignments, I really did see how much I had learned. The pace of my courses here is such that I never feel like I'm coasting. Back at Mills, I certainly didn't feel like I was coasting the whole time, but I always felt like I was standing on solid ground by the end of a lecture, even if the beginning of a lecture had me feeling a bit wobbly with new concepts. (Well, a few times even at the end I didn't feel like all was well, but the rest of my foundation was so solid that it didn't matter) Here - I don't feel that stability. And until you take the moment to go back and think over what you've done, it feels like you haven't made any progress, if you are used to measuring progress in your own confidence. But I have learned things.
But right now, quite honestly, the main thing on my mind is the GRE. The big bad exam. It's a week from Saturday - on the 19th. And right now, the main thing I'm thinking is that I want to take it now. As I sit and work through ages of tedious integrals, breaking my brain to remember trigonometric identities and recall how to find the equation of a surface in three dimensions - I really realize how much more interesting the math I am doing now is. But studying is important, I realize, which is why I do it. And even if I feel a bit like I'm going mad in the process, it'll be done soon.
I can barely imagine the free time I will have when it's over!
Speaking of free time, I should get back to work now, but I'll leave you with a bit more math humor. Check it out here. Good ol' xkcd. Always good for some fun.
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