We have room draw now. This is, of course, the method by which the rooms are assigned to students. Here is a general overview (Mudders: yes, this is simplified and ignores dorms that aren't East, West, or North, ignores frosh, ignores petitions, ignores proctors ( Read more... )

I had a prof who, on his office door, kept a sign which said "Educational Iniquity is this nation's greatest injustice. You can help change this" (as an aside, a humorous reading is that this sign is encouraging you to make some OTHER injustice even worse). I agree with the sentiment (well, at least with the sentiment that it is a great iniquity ( Read more... )

(via reddit) Happy 2 * 3 * 5 * (7+11+13+17+19).

Presently working on thesis midterm report. Working out a little bit of arithmetic, I discovered that I need to set a certain parameter to n-17 log(n \phi). I thought some people who read this might appreciate that.

Lots of people I know are taking a year off between undergrad and grad school to do something constructive (volunteerism writ large, etc). What do people who read this think of such a plan?

I have a passing interest in interesting sentences. For example, it can be argued that any number of instances of the word 'buffalo' concatenated forms a valid English sentence (it's a noun and a verb, then apply 'Cats cats fight fight'). I have been trying to come up with a sentence which uses the word thair. Thair rhymes with chair and might ( Read more... )

Lest my lj posts be completely devoid of math, I should mention a conjecture which was conjectured during my logic independent study, for which I have a pretty hand-wavy proof (but I'm not really inclined to work out the details further). It is: the primitive recurisve functions are exactly those functions $f(n)$ which can be computed on a Turing ( Read more... )

A friend of mine told me her friend dropped out of school and is working in a coffee shop and hanging out with anarchists. I'm kind of jealous. There's not enough "real life" in my life ( Read more... )

What's the best way to a refer to a paper written by a person and his wife (of a different last name), to the person in question? That is, if you're talking to Smith, who is married to Jones, about a paper with Doe (unrelated), you can just say ( Read more... )

Dear math-doing folks, here is a question of notation. Here are two conditions on functions from R->R:

(a) for all 0 <= t <= 1, all x, all y f(tx + (1-t)y) <= t f(x) + (1-t)f(y ( Read more... )