Resplendence

It has been some time since I wrote here and I regret that I have begun multiple posts with this statement.  I had planned to put some interesting stuff from summer here, but then felt it was too trivial to grab your attention (look how reader-dedicated I am, either that or I am just too lazy or head weighted to share all my thoughts here).

Summer was fun, really hot and everything, but mostly I was in lab and used to work for long hours. With no one around to ask how many hours I actually worked it did not seem like ‘work’ but more like living in the lab itslef. Made some interesting progress in my project and my thesis, but basically enjoyed roaming on empty campus pretending to myself that I owned the place. Summer has ended and new year has brought hordes of new students to the campus, reminds me of last year (on a side note the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes horde also as ‘..subdivision of Asian nomads’ .. hits the point uncomfortably close to the mark ). The passages, corridors and streets in the campus are throbbing with new students trying to find a route to a class. Today I saw that in DBH, the door to the passage leading to copier machine room and exit has a note, ”This door does not lead to any class room, Please see the directory behind you”, I silently chuckled to myself, because I remember last year at around this time, I was looking for a class and had walked into that very passage.

The Fall has come, but heat does not seem to be receding, I enjoy the weather though, I am running on treadmill every alternate evening until the shirt is soaking wet all over. It is new quarter and it looks like I will be working on something completely new this time, let’s see how it goes, feeling apprehensive, intimidated and hopeful all at the same time. Will post more about it if it goes well, if it does not I will pretend I never attempted it (read some ‘motivational line’ to this effect too). This time, though, it seems I am having serious trouble in taking my courses, which brings me to the classes I am attempting right now. So Enter Mathematics Department.

I attempted three classes in Math department in a day and at the end of 150 minutes, I am convinced that Mathematicians and rest Engineers/Scientists are different species from each other. Humans and squirrels have more in common than an Engineer and a Mathematician. They are some wonderful folk, they have this awesome theory about every single thing, they have this superb level of abstraction, but somehow they seems unfettered from such things as “need to have a footing in reality”, their levels of abstractions are so far from anything you or me (assuming you are not a mathematician) are usually accustomed to, that every once in a while we feel like pausing and raising our hands and asking the Professor politely “No offence, but what’s the point of what you have been talking since last 20 minutes?”. No I am not saying what they do is pointless, I am just saying that they have this extremely rigorous way of stating every point that you usually lose the idea of where or what you started. Reminds me of this comic from XKCD.

I attended Manifolds and Topology class, Stochastic Processes  class and Probability models class , by the end of each I was so marinated in dozens of pages long definitions, corollaries and properties and sub-properties that recalling what all went on in the class was almost like a physical agony. Another point I felt after the class was these people have serious liking for the Greek letters and Gothic fonts and an Aversion for normal letters from English alphabet. “π-stable” ? “ζ² spaces”? Seriously? How about calling it ‘stable’ because we are not talking about any other kind of stability right now. Replacing that gothic style Greek letter with superscript with a simple line ‘space of all elements of power set, call it Z’ and if you don’t like it so long how about “Z = power set(‘some set’)” ? No, if it can be typed in normal text editor, we ain’t touchin’ it, what’s geekiness without some LATEX typesetting being absolutely essential in what we write?

Next point that is something I think everyone knows about mathematicians: they spend immense amounts of time and derive infinite pleasure from proving the obvious, yes I understand the proof itself is not ‘obvious’, but implications are and also, why do you need to be so uptight (=rigorous) about proving it from scratch even when the actual implication of such a proof is not a part of anything I am learning in next3 months? Lastly they hate Social Science department! Something came up in one of the classes and someone cracked quite an insulting joke (I will not quote the joke itself) about Social Science department and people actually laughed instead of giving him a dirty look, I found it quite strange.

Oh well, enough whining about Math dept., and seeing that I might actually take one of those courses I need to STFU and get studying, all in all, the first ‘exposure’ to alien race was a nice experience, let us see how far it goes..

So that is all for right now, until next time (when I need to whine about a different department, may be),

Adios!