pastwatcher | (no subject)

(no subject)

Thanks to all who took enough time out of their own exploding lives to give me encouragement.
I'm actually /happy/ about doing a Topology final and nothing else for the next three days, how weird is that? :)

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Yay take-homes!

Good luck on your topology and everything else :-)

Thank you--it's going quite well (solved 3 out of 4 problems, at least, though I haven't written them up at all). You too!
And I'm sorry I seem to have let our story drop for now--must get back on that...after finals, most likely.

Thanks. Ditto on the story. :-)

Not weird at all; tests are AWESOME!

I wouldn't make such a blanket statement. However, looking at this test, it is, indeed, AWESOME.

Yes--I was actually going to tell you to check it out. :)

You know me too well.

But why the hell am I liking topology? It is EEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL!

Are you planning on taking Diff Geo any time soon? I want to learn that.

Hmm...I hadn't really thought about it. Not this coming semester--I'll be continuing Abstract Algebra and doing Complex Analysis...ugh, I just realized how boring that will be. Well, maybe Galois theory and stuff will be fun. But anyway. In the fall, I'm not sure--if there's a good tutorial on Diff Geo I'll take that, as I want to take a tutorial; I'm not sure whether I'll add one or two normal math classes to that, and Michael has convinced me to at least strongly consider taking 272 (algebraic topology, supposed to be good next year). If I add a second, I suppose differential geometry would make sense. I haven't done any...shrug...presumably I ought to by the end of next year.

Galois theory is just about the only part of 123 that I liked. I did not apreciate the stuff about rings and modules until I learned some representation theory.

As for Com Plex Analysis, it is F***ing beautiful. Unfortunately, the course does not tell you that. But I suggest to read the relavant chapters in the new Penrose first, to get a sense of the beauty, and hold that in mind when taking the course. Once you get past all the "does this series converge" crap, and when you are not saying, "which messed up contour do I need to integrate on", the theorems are really quite clean. There are many fewer messy functions on the Reimann Sphere than on the real line.

Do we get to deal with non-commutative rings in 123? I like group theory and ring theory, sort of, but not so much the way we're doing it.

Yay! I should remember to do that over Intersession, though I may not actually have the book at that point (though I could my friend Con for it)...remind me at Vericon?
Thank you!

My version of 123 did not deal with non-commutative rings. But Galois theory is awesome enough to make it a good course. I am, at heart, still an algebraist, and group theory is very near and dear to me. Some of these modules and polynomials and stuff however get way too close to number theory for me to feel comfortable with them. It just isn't pretty.

If I remember, I will bring my Penrose up to Vericon.

Note: Penrose is not a Com Plex Analysis book, not any other textbook. It is a physics book for laypersons. The first half of this 1200 page book tries to teach someone with a Folk&Myth degree all the math that they need in order to understand physics. And by physics, I means string theory and beyond. He does a nice job of explaining a lot of the major theorems and how they relates to each other, without getting bogged down in the detail of proof.

Why so evil? What about knot theory--that is not the most awesome aspect ever?

There are parts of topology that I find moderately cool. But if it is not a C-infinity manifold, or at least an orbifold, then really I couldn't care.
Basically, I find it a bunch of tools that can be used to study interesting problems, but with little inherent beauty or interest in itself. Much like Real Analysis in that respect.

Another thing is that I like my sets to have powerful structure on them, and a general topological structure is not enough. This is one of the reasons I am so keen to learn me some diff geo. Whole loads of structure we can throw on there.

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