Math Life

It occurs to me that I would have huge respect for someone with a Tupac-esque "MATH LIFE" tattoo on their abdominal area. Just a heads-up.

Since I last posted, I had the honour of playing board games with some of my math humans. We played Agricola, which was fun and pleasantly agricultural. Tomorrow I am going to attend a party where I will likely see more people of the math-y persuasion so I may gather more blog fodder there. This would be good for my ability to post things here.

At the gathering where we played Agricola, I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a math grad student who is currently working on his thesis-y bit. It is about automata, which isn't something that I had any familiarity with. It's been a while since I got the explanation so I've unfortunately forgotten most of it. The analogy he used had something to do with the little light in a microwave, I think. I might be making that up though.

Also, Max and his coworkers may have made an unprecedented discovery in math! I live with a symmetry group pioneer!

Breaking the Unintentional Hiatus

As you will notice if you look at the date of my last post here, I took a break of sorts for the month of June. There has been little of mathematical interest going on in my life unless you consider aging to be a math-related process. This is partly because I have been aging (just like the rest of you!) but mostly because I started my summer job, which is working at a seniors' recreation centre. It's been going really well and I'm thoroughly enjoying it but there isn't much math involved. One of the weirdest moments working there so far was discovering that one of the members has belonged to the centre for longer than I've been alive. She joined literally the day before I was born.

While I was incommunicado, I had an one semi-interesting math-related experience. A bunch of Max's friends from the Physics department came to our housewarming party and I managed to make one of them think that I had taken Calculus 3 (or "Cal 3" as it is colloquially known) by working Taylor expansions into the conversation. Sadly, at this point I had already divulged that I was an arts student and I went on to disabuse him of his mistaken notion of my having taken MATH 222. I think that if I am going to successfully pretend to be in math I will have to get over my need for scrupulous honesty.