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As a small effort in self-gratification after finishing uni, I have been looking into getting tournament scheduling possibilities coded into clux.org. Initially, I planned on doing this last year before it went live by hooking it into the already unreasonably complex (for this site anyway) event system - which you can only see by registering - but it turned out to take a little more mental effort than I expected. In particular, the problem of how to order seeds into the tournament bracket seemed a bit random. I think it's worked out now however, so I thought I'd share. Venture on if that interests you.
Oh, and my custom
renderer is installed for the maths geeks (so for this site: myself), so all maths is now properly rendered in cool transparent white font gifs. As a maths graduate (which feels awesome), this is pretty much a necessity!
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I am unofficially a first class master of mathematics! My fourth year results arrived in my inbox today, which means I get to throw the canonical square hat in the air at the 19th of July! Oh, and ding: Achievement unlocked! Nothing like putting the good old gaming spin on serious achievements, and I reckon this one would be worth a couple of thousand G's - which is Xbox achievement currency for the uninitiated. The Xbox logo was easier/cooler to shop than the steam one, which is why this unfamiliar lingo is put forth. The shopping action still took me way too long for this.. Oh well!
Anyway, these are my last results ever. If anything I do ever gets posted up here, they should be amongst them.
Matrix Analysis & Algorithms 71
Algebraic Number Theory 80
Galois Theory 67
Topics in Number Theory 83
Elliptic Curves 83
Lie Algebras 59
Project 76
Computational Linear Algebra & Optimization 77
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Found in the goldmine that is the printed set of Number Theory lecture notes.
Theorem 4.1. Every positive integer n can be written as the sum of four integer squares.
This is a statement that your non-mathematical parents would understand. If they ask you what you've learned in three or four years on a maths degree you can mention this, and they'll be very impressed and think that your education has been worthwhile. Most of your other modules give you statements that are pure gobbledygook to the uninitiated. Galois Theory gives a few statements that your parents might understand but they're all negative: you can't solve a quintic, or contruct a heptagon, or trisect an angle. Number Theory gives positive assertions that broaden your horizons, and expand the frontiers of your knowledge...
If you've survived reading the previous paragraph without vomiting then you have strong constitution and is ready for the proof of the Four Squares Theorem.
Proof:...
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Having programmed a few ridiculous (I thought) examples of linear algebra gone wild in my C optimization course I thought I would share some insight into what your computer does.
I will not go into the maths much, but matrices and vectors are the foundations of linear algebra. It’s used constantly for rendering graphics, and to find solutions of equations (also happens a lot in virtually every area in your life, but you don’t really think much about it). What you do in linear algebra, are based upon these primary operations in an n-dimensional space.
1.Vector products (two sets of n-coordinates multiplying one by one and summing them up) requires n additions and multiplications.
2.Matrix-vector multiplication (generates a new vector via a dot product operation on each vector element) requires n^2 multiplications and additions, which is tedious on paper even for n>5.
3.Matrix-Matrix multiplication (generates a new matrix via a dot product for each of the n^2 elements) requires n^3 multiplications and additions. This gets tedious on paper for n>3.
We are doing the latter in our project, the heaviest operations, in a space of n=3200 dimensions. That means we are doing 3200^3 multiplications; roughly 33 million operations. Now, we are using these multiplications to somehow calculate some properties of this 3200*3200 matrix (namely the eigenvalues) so we do this (and a bunch of other necessary stuff, but comparatively negligible) and wrap it in a for loop for it to run for 100 iterations.
Get that. Just that matrix, which has 3200*3200 elements, each using 8 bytes of storage, demands a total of around 80MB for itself (not mentioning its factors) and 33 million multiplications to calculate. We do this 100 times; over 3 billion multiplications. This corresponds to 3 gigaflops (3*10^9 floating point operations). A 2008 quadcore CPUs could do 80gigaflops per second! So assuming you do not run out of memory and have one of these new great CPUs; what the fuck does your computer actually do when it lags? It must do something more than 30 times more demanding than that! Your video game must require more than 90 billion multiplications per second to render.
Take a step back and think about the utter insanity that machine you use for your porn is capable of.
for it owns you
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Final year; the end of the game, the top of the pyramid. Except it isn’t. Mathematics education never ends.
The courses for this year were presented enthusiastically by our to-be lecturers, but when their presentations inevitably trailed onto the part where they have to convince you why the fuck you would take this ridiculously hard module over the other equally ridiculously hard modules, their arguments seemed to emulate more the rhetorics of a pyramid scheme presentation than that of an institution that is supposed to prepare you for the real world. But yes, how else do you attract someone to study something that very likely is not going to be of any use in this century?
They have, at any rate, three cards to play. None of them are the usefulness of the course.
1. The beauty element: the module presents a well thought out logical system and of abstract definitions, yielding surprising and elegant results.
2. The pyramid pusher: taking this module will let you be able to further your studies on topics involving this module. The PhD preparation factor, for those so inclined.
3. The pyramid puller: if you do not take this module, but have the prerequisites, you have essentially wasted your time by building several smaller pyramids.
The beauty element is really important. Fine, you have defined a strict system of logical rules, and inside that system, this course does exceedingly well at manipulating and bending them, but the moment you find beauty in them is the moment you get it presented rigorously in that well thought out form, and not the all too often lectured informal style that glosses over the details.
At any rate, my money’s on number theoretic and programming type modules. My fourth year project is on web encryption and apparently I am supposed to present it on the 17th of February. My LaTeX gears have been oiled up for this occasion.
I wish I could do some more work on my site, especially importing my old albums, but also to write more posts. Unfortunately, time is a depressingly scarce resource at the moment. Ah, and I also have one a metric fuck-ton (we will define that as one years worth) of photos sitting on my hard drive as well. In an almost divine stroke of work load relief however, the accumulation of these photos has been halted. My shutter button broke off. But, you’re not really missing much from the chavy part of leamington anyway.
I leave you with the mental image of a great poster, that has now been removed from the mathematics department. Einstein with the inspiring quote; The most important thing is never to stop questioning. The reason it was taken down, probably, was that someone had written in bold below ‘Why?’. That’s a win in my book.
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It's nothing like having a great set of lecture notes in mathematics. If the written notes for a course are good, things make sense, if there are no notes, you usually only take the course if the lecturer writes really good notes on the board. There is no point learning mathematics if the notes themselves make no sense, we might as well just memorize formulae if we are not supposed to understand why it works. Granted, this is obvious, but for some reason it is not to some of the very people teaching us at Warwick.
The Fourier Analysis lecturer lulled us into a false state of appreciation by handing out great notes, and telling us that he was roughly going to follow them. It would have been good to know that when he said follow, he meant butcher. It was covered in such a way that we were actually reading the notes instead of listening to that douche while we were there because of his checkbox approach to proofs that he presumably patented. Seriously, no mathematician puts a question mark down for then later to replace it with a check after thinking a sketch proof out loud.
The result is that the bits he covered himself (in the same style) we have no real proof or any justification for anything except wikipedian glory. The last three weeks were roughly all him, and therein lie a dense paper that he covered - as one might use that word ? and now he expects us to possibly write an essay on in the exam instead of one of the other questions. Ha.
If you had had the fucking decency to follow the canonical definition-theorem style presentation of your course, the bits we actually had to learn primarily from you would not eat up more time than it took for me to write this post and we would be cool. But you had to infringe on my zombie killing time online, by making me frustrated enough to write this, and making me further develop my zombie killing inclination to cover the realm of the non-undead. Fuck your essay and your last three weeks.
The worst thing? It is actually a good idea, and I really like the general content of the course. Unfortunately, this guy saw convolution on the syllabus and made it a goddamned mission.
two more weeks will go by fast. two more will go by fast. two more weeks will go by fast.
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MA3F10 Introduction to Topology 3hrs 21 Apr 09:30 Westwood Games Hall
MA3G70 Functional Analysis I 3hrs 21 Apr 14:00 Westwood Games Hall
MA3590 Measure Theory 3hrs 22 Apr 14:00 Westwood Games Hall
MA3B8 Complex Analysis 3hrs 20 May 14:00 Panorama Room
MA433 Fourier Analysis 3hrs 22 May 09:30 Westwood Games Hall
MA3G8 Functional Analysis II 3hrs 23 May 14:00 Panorama Room
MA455 Manifolds 3hrs 30 May 09:30 Panorama Room
ST202 Stochastic Processes 2hrs 16 Jun 14:00 Panorama Room
ST213 Mathematics of Random Events 2hrs 17 Jun 09:30 Panorama Room
Appropriately spaced out as always.
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Not to boast, as practically no-one reads this shit anyway; just archiving. That's not to say that I'm not happy though.
2nd Year Essay 84
Metric Spaces 81.3
Differentiation 71.2
Vector Analysis 77
Analysis III 75.8
Number Theory 76
Algebra I 76
Algebra II 75.8
PDE 87
Mathematical Statistics 66
S_2=75.59
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Batch 1;
MA251 MA2510 Algebra I: Advanced Linear Algebra - 2hr 0mins - 21 Apr 14:00 Panorama Room
MA231 MA2310 Vector Analysis - 2hr 0mins - 22 Apr 14:00 Panorama Room
MA244 MA2440 Analysis III - 2hr 0mins - 25 Apr 14:00 Panorama Room
CHECK.
Batch 2;
MA225 MA2250 Differentiation - 2hr 0mins - 03 Jun 09:30 Panorama Room
MA246 MA2460 Number Theory - 1hr 30mins - 05 Jun 14:00 Panorama Room
MA249 MA2490 Algebra II: Groups and Rings - 2hr 0mins - 10 Jun 14:00 Panorama Room
MA222 MA2220 Metric Spaces - 2hr 0mins - 11 Jun 09:30 Panorama Room
MA250 MA2500 PDE - 2hr 0mins - 13 Jun 14:00 Butterworth Hall
ST217 ST2172 Mathematical Statistics B - 2hr 0mins - 16 Jun 09:30 Westwood Games Hall
CHECK!
woooooooo00000( ) ( ) !
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This was found on one of the random blackboards in the maths department. Anything to remember
things.
If M's a complete metric space,
And non-empty, it's always the case,
If f's a contraction,
Then under its action,
Exactly one point stays in place!
