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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.
