A case of the MONDAYs

Ok, not really. Just more like a case of getting up early.

Only five people in CLA today. That isn't that much of a surprise- to Csaba either, because it is 8 AM on a Monday, and some people don't like his teaching style. We talked about inequalities and convex functions and neat stuff that is really helpful that I haven't seen before.

Then was FUN. It was a lot of fun~ We proved the theorem, that any vector space has a basis(following from Zorn's Lemma), and we went on to prove the existence of ultrafilters. This is relatively intense stuff- Godel came up with it. We also talked about how this related to probability. We considere the situation when you have a urn of countably many balls with the natural numbers on the balls. Then what is the probability of drawing an even ball?

During the break, the professor was talking about his area of research, and how it coincides with Terry Tao of UCLA. He recounted how last year in February he was told they were working on the same question. He said he better start working like hell, because Tao was 100 times smarter than him. I think this is really funny, since the Green-Tao theorem is something I admire and can one day, hopefully understand.

Had a good lunch of chicken penne with a yummy lemon lychee drink from the cafeteria.

Then was combinatorics. Not the most exciting class- but I'm going to take it. I'm in Hungary, after all. It never really feels like real math like me, but I have to admit today we did some pretty interesting things. We considered generating functions. With it we can solve questions simply such as the following. We roll 5 dice, how many different ways can we get a sum of 18? Hint- the solution is between 500 and 1000.

Went home, finished up Sam and Max Episode 4, defeating Abe Lincoln. Hooray!

Did a bunch of math- including coming to grips with the last class of character theory. To me, it feels like a challenge I can't refuse. Csaba told me if I pass the class he will take me out for two beers. But I was told last year 7 survived that class, and only 5 survived abstract algebra. So I suppose I should choose what I'm more interested about. That being said, I'll probably sit in on abstract algebra tomorrow morning, and if we do something extremely cool- such as prove there really does not exist any group with order 87, then I might take the class.

Had a good dinner- of more microwaved chicken cordon bleu, and some bread with tasty pesto sauce I purchased. Watched the new Terminator episode, and really enjoyed it.

Got some more homework out of the way- including finishing my Hungarian h/w, and trying to finish my computing homework due tomorrow. I got tired before finishing, oh well. I'll have some time to work on it tomorrow, I hope. Also looked at more REUs I'll apply for later.

That is all for today. Tomorrow class until five....