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.

Consequence of Bilingual Education

I haven't posted here in a while, mostly because of the lack of newsworthy math in my life. Since I am not exactly in a position to present myself with new and crazy math and CS tidbits I have instead been reading books and attempting to improve my driving. Some of those activities have been more pleasant than others. I thought about borrowing my brother's math textbook and seeing if I can wrap my mind around math that is near where I left off but I haven't yet because I'm somewhat anxious about the results and I feel that asking for the use of the textbook in question might lead to some sort of interrogation and possibly mockery. I might still do it, though.

Thinking about my brother's math education made me think about mine, specifically the fact that (like all the rest of my pre-university schooling) it was conducted in French. Since numbers are the same in English this didn't pose too many practical problems in my everyday life. It still doesn't. I would argue that I'm able to figure out whether a smaller but cheaper container of yogurt is a better purchase than the larger, more expensive one just as well as an Ontario-educated anglophone. However, learning math in French has led to some interesting troubles with math-related vocabulary. Probably the best example of this that I have is when a girl with whom I took an extracurricular sewing class (yes, I am that cool) was telling the rest of us about some sort of To Sir With Love-type scenario in which a teacher went into a new but underprivileged school where the students were considerably behind and "didn't know what integers were". I'm sure that to the rest of the kids in my class this conveyed an accurate impression of just how deficient these children's education had been but it made me spend an awkward half-hour (or maybe week, I think I dwelt on this for a long time) wondering what one was and why I had to ask myself that question. I guess my killer googling skills hadn't developed very much at that point.

Having talked to other people who went to French school (Max, for example) about the math vocabulary situation, I've gathered that if you switch math languages partway through your education there will be a learning curve but it's not insurmountable. This is comforting as I'd still like to audit a math class this fall and it would be nice to understand at least some of it.

Stay in Math, Kids

So I'm pretty sure that this cherry picker/sunset date idea (http://blag.xkcd.com/2009/04/06/a-date-idea-analyzed/) is just about the coolest thing I have ever heard of. It also definitely makes me regret not having persevered in my mathematical studies (which, as previously mentioned, were not all that extensive nor very impressive) because now I'll probably never be able to work this type of thing out. All I'll be able to do, if I happen to come up with something this awesome and offbeat and ridiculous, is tell people about it really enthusiastically and hope that it will fall on the right ears for someone to actually figure out how it would work. Being enthusiastic about things is something that I do relatively well, though, so I guess I can legitimately have some degree of hope that that could happen.

I do love my current fields of study, though, so not having carried on with math wasn't a total loss.

Fighting to the Death

I'd never played Risk before last Sunday. My brothers asked for (and received) the "2210" version a couple of Christmases ago but I never participated when they played because I wasn't particularly interested in board games that take hours. Also, it's a four-player game and the other participants were usually my two younger cousins, which would have rendered me de trop. However, last Sunday I witnessed my first game of Risk and found it sufficiently interesting to warrant playing when the opportunity presented itself over the course of the following week. Including the game that I watched on Sunday, there were three games, all of which were the Lord of the Rings version of Risk. This simultaneously makes it more fun and more emotionally traumatic. When playing I pretty much just wanted to maintain a peaceful existence and protect the Shire, which is not the point of the game.

Having awakened my latent Risk-play abilities (if not abilities, then perhaps interest), upon my return home on Monday I proposed to my brothers that they dust off their Risk set so that we could play. We did but we had to stop partway through because things got somewhat heated, so we gave it a rest and finished tonight. Eric (my youngest brother) wound up with total global domination. It was pretty obvious partway through tonight's session that that would be the end result but I refused to concede defeat and fought to the death. My last turn saw me start with only one territory (Japan) that was occupied by one valiant troop. I managed to use my three reinforcements to take two more territories but it was all over by the end of Eric's next turn.

The Risk 2210 game board is kind of interesting in that it represents the game designer's idea of what the world will look like in 200 years. It's obviously been simplified in order for there to be territories big enough to keep gamepieces on as well. Interesting geopolitical quirks include the existence of the "Exiled States of America," which are in the vicinity of Greenland.

Risk can be tied into the mathematical nature of this blog by the importance of probability in gameplay, with the rolling of dice. I like to defend using only one die because I find it really unpleasant to lose two troop pieces on one roll but it was pointed out to me that probability is more in my favour if I defend using two. My problem in a lot of strategy-type games is that I tend to let my feelings and whatnot get in the way. I also need to practice thinking in the correct patterns more.

Models, Theses and the Situation

Recent days have brought more math and CS-related awesomeness. Max has been investigating the symmetries of the five regular polyhedra and in order to better do this he built models of the polyhedra in question. He used bristol board and glue (which was sometimes replaced by tape) and the resulting models were really cool-looking. I especially liked the icosahedron, partly because of its shape and partly because it was a soothing shade of dark green. The models and the ensuing discussion of symmetries also allowed me to gain new vocabulary words:

Vertex: Point. Or corner. Regular polyhedra have vertices that are all the same (in that the faces are assembled identically around each one).

I can't actually remember my other new polyhedron/symmetry-related words but I may post about them again later if they come back to me. They pertained to the symmetries and whether or not the way the polyhedron looks changes, I think.

In other news, Antoine (who used to be doing a minor in CS but has since changed his mind) told me (well, technically it was an "us" but I am writing this in the first person singular) about the MIT CS paper generator (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/) yesterday. It's pretty cool. You put in the names of up to five authors and it will come up with a fake computer science-related paper these people have supposedly authored, complete with citations and everything. The papers in question apparently do not make all that much sense but they look pretty good to me. As is mentioned on the SCIgen homepage, they are trying to "maximize amusement, rather than coherence".

I would still like to post a picture of my painted and Matlab-postered room as well as of Max's awesomely awesome models but this will have to wait for three or so weeks because I will be at home/my parents' house for that amount of time. This also means that I will be away from my current sources of blog fodder, which is slightly problematic. Never fear, however, as my new location comes complete with two brothers, one of whom (though still in high school) is better versed in math than me. So though the level of math will be lower I will still be learning, hopefully things of the blog-worthy persuasion. Also, I am considering turning toward more math culture-type pursuits.

Head A Splode

One of the problems that I have in attempting to be mathlike is with the necessary patterns of thinking. My arts student brain, used to picking apart readings and, uh, remembering things, has THE HARDEST TIME trying to bend in the ways required of it in math. For example, yesterday Max asked me about a problem that he was trying to figure out for his job (which is doing math). The problem goes something like this:

Part One (this one I had no trouble with): Imagine a cube inside a sphere. The cube and sphere are sized so that the corners of the cube touch the sphere's surface. Now, using your mind, curve the sides of the cube so that they also touch the surface of the sphere.

Part Two (guard your minds, mine suffered ill effects): Imagine the original cube from the previous exercise but instead of putting it in a sphere put it in a torus (new vocabulary word! This is the technical math-term for a donut shape). Now try to do the inflation-of-the-sides thing.

Honestly, I can't even really conceptualize what we're trying to do here. My best thought was maybe putting the cube in one side of the torus and then stretching it all the way around when you come to the inflation bit. On an encouraging note, Max says that we're not really sure what we're doing here so I guess this isn't entirely an arts brain fail. Also, his idea of how to do this was the same as my best thought. Apparently this notion of how one would solve this doesn't regularize though. I asked why we couldn't just use Matlab to model it for us and was told that it is more of an applied tool whereas Maple is more symbolic.

But yeah. http://no.hablo.matlab.head.asplode.net/

Math Party

Yesterday I attended a housewarming party in honour of two of my friends' new apartment. One of them is actually in math and the other one thinks/pretends that she is. While getting my drunkpants on at this party, which was attended by a bunch of other math-type humans, I realised what one of my favourite things is about people in math. I really like how they integrate math terms into everyday conversation. This is probably not unique to the mathematically inclined but doing it with math words seems to have a certain... tang. This realisation came about when one of the partygoers referred to the number of people that she has dated as her relationship experience set. I liked it a lot.