(no subject)
Today has been a consistently good day -- I wish that weren't as surprising as it is.
I awoke at eleven and remembered that I had agreed to help Neil run a seminar for first-years on the virtually inexhaustible topic of "How to do Math the U of C Way." We didn't get very far: we went over induction, some basic terminology and notation from set theory, and did a good primer on epsilon-delta proofs. It was really fun, though, and quite satisfying when several of the first-years claimed to have experienced moments of clarity.
We also learned that bringing three math majors (myself, Neil, and Alex from Snell) into a room to teach things to impressionable first-years results is several moments of surrealism. For example, we were looking through Spivak for a nice identity that we could use induction to prove, and we stumbled across this one (here converted into English text for your convenience): "The sum of the first n cube numbers is equal to the square of the sum of the first n numbers." Needless to say, we three were dumbfounded by this elegance, leading to about ten seconds of amazed silence and thirty seconds of all three of us talking at once. Also, a lot of our explanations were punctuated by phrases to such as "And there's a nice theorem that's beyond the scope of this seminar" and "Well, if you want to get technical, what I just told you is false." Then we would see the blank looks and rein ourselves in and just tell them how to pass their math courses.
Directly afterwards, Neil, Rathika, Tsunami and I went up to Devon and ate Indian food and shopped at Patel Brothers, which is apparently a chain of Indian-food-based grocery stores. There was much hilarity: we were riding in a car, and we saw a man dressed for exercise carrying a tennis racket and a hopper full of balls. One ball fell out and rolled across the street and he chased it. That sounds rather mundane, but it was hilarious to us. Also, an older man who looked kind of lost, and who was wearing glasses, a vest full of pockets, and cargo shorts. He looked like he was on an expedition to exotic Chicago. We wanted to yell "Hey, professor!" just to see if he would turn around. He was probably a professor.
(Note on Chicago geography: Devon street changes abruptly from Honorary Golda Meir Boulevard to Honorary Gandhi Boulevard and then to Honorary Muhammad Ali Jinnah Boulevard. Hilarious!)
Now I am home, and I am probably going to see "Grindhouse" tonight if I can stay awake. A day well-spent.
I awoke at eleven and remembered that I had agreed to help Neil run a seminar for first-years on the virtually inexhaustible topic of "How to do Math the U of C Way." We didn't get very far: we went over induction, some basic terminology and notation from set theory, and did a good primer on epsilon-delta proofs. It was really fun, though, and quite satisfying when several of the first-years claimed to have experienced moments of clarity.
We also learned that bringing three math majors (myself, Neil, and Alex from Snell) into a room to teach things to impressionable first-years results is several moments of surrealism. For example, we were looking through Spivak for a nice identity that we could use induction to prove, and we stumbled across this one (here converted into English text for your convenience): "The sum of the first n cube numbers is equal to the square of the sum of the first n numbers." Needless to say, we three were dumbfounded by this elegance, leading to about ten seconds of amazed silence and thirty seconds of all three of us talking at once. Also, a lot of our explanations were punctuated by phrases to such as "And there's a nice theorem that's beyond the scope of this seminar" and "Well, if you want to get technical, what I just told you is false." Then we would see the blank looks and rein ourselves in and just tell them how to pass their math courses.
Directly afterwards, Neil, Rathika, Tsunami and I went up to Devon and ate Indian food and shopped at Patel Brothers, which is apparently a chain of Indian-food-based grocery stores. There was much hilarity: we were riding in a car, and we saw a man dressed for exercise carrying a tennis racket and a hopper full of balls. One ball fell out and rolled across the street and he chased it. That sounds rather mundane, but it was hilarious to us. Also, an older man who looked kind of lost, and who was wearing glasses, a vest full of pockets, and cargo shorts. He looked like he was on an expedition to exotic Chicago. We wanted to yell "Hey, professor!" just to see if he would turn around. He was probably a professor.
(Note on Chicago geography: Devon street changes abruptly from Honorary Golda Meir Boulevard to Honorary Gandhi Boulevard and then to Honorary Muhammad Ali Jinnah Boulevard. Hilarious!)
Now I am home, and I am probably going to see "Grindhouse" tonight if I can stay awake. A day well-spent.