As with most nerds, I have a predisposition to being nerd sniped. Sometimes it’s a puzzle, but more often it’s simply an idea or the opportunity for a new project. After a conversation with a few coworkers, I’ve latched onto the idea of developing a summer course focused on the history of mathematics. ...
The other week, a student posted on /r/math that they made a summary of multivariable calculus. As they point out, it’s an 80-page summary, but at least it’s shorter than the textbook it followed. The student admitted they’d used Google Docs, as opposed to LaTeX, to make these notes, and the images they used were just taken from the internet. As a result, a Github project was opened up for people to turn it into LaTeX, and I’ve taken it upon myself to slowly recreate the figures using Asymptote. ...
I recently watched the 2016 film Swiss Army Man for the first time. My base line description of it is a fantastical, psycho-dramatic take on Castaway. I loved it. ...
I’m pretty aware of the idea of transition costs, and I’ve experienced them first-hand quite a lot throughout college. Moving into a new apartment comes with many potential transition costs. So does getting a new computer, or changing operating systems. These are all costs that I have some practice handling, and they don’t tend to bother me. In fact, the prospect of handling them can be exciting. But recently, I’ve been dealing with mental transition costs. ...
Earlier this year, I started working on a programming project. I recently added a little more to it, and worked out a handful of kinks. It’s been fun, but I think I’m winding down on it. I’m sure in some spurts of passion I’ll work on it some more, but I’ve moved on to another Python-related project, that also gets to the core of my interests: mathematics. ...
One of the coolest resources available to everyone in the US is public archive and research services. While I was always tangentially aware of their existence (the Library of Congress being one of the main entities associated in my mind) it was never something that was clearly within reach, nor of any use. Most of research I did in high school found third-party research that were quick online searches away. In college I took a British History class, and then I was informed of the services that the university paid for which I could access. This allowed me to find old editions of British newspapers, which were very cool to go through. ...
If you’ve never used a Plug ’n Play game before, you’re missing out. They were the one piece of simple video game fun I had growing up. Beyond that, it was various Flash-based games in a browser (and since that’s my only association with Flash, I’m quite bummed it’s being killed.) And although some of my friends had consoles, and I would play occasionally, it was never something that really grabbed my attention. ...
I’m teaching a math camp for students entering 6th grade. It’s my first time being the teacher of record for a course, and luckily it only took a few minutes for my anxiety to subside. It’s a small group – only 9 kids – so it reminds me of my days being a camp counselor, except now it’s talking about math with very advanced kids for 3 hours a day. It’s been a blast. ...
I’ve written a short post on the triangle inequality for altitudes. As usual, I put it over on the math blog I have with my company, just because the support for literally everything is much nicer. But, in the off chance you want it, I have a PDF. I’ve played around with a wonderful program called Typora, which I’ve been using for a few months to write any blog posts when I’m not in my iPad. It has great Mathjax support (miles better than Wordpress), and so it’s easy to switch between the blog I use and this program, and I can export cleanly to PDF, as well as EPub and other formats that are really difficult to work with if I were using straight up LaTeX.
I never actually thought this would happen to me. Despite years not regularly going to coffee shops, and never drinking coffee, I finally came to terms with the fact that I have a drink of choice at Starbucks. It comes with the realization that I go to Starbucks enough to justify having a go-to order. ...