Monday, March 10, 2008

more homework! and fun~

yet another decently productive day, homework and non-homework wise. so i did do a lot of work, including a lot of catch up in Combinatorics. i think i'll be staying in my class. a lot of what we were doing in class was not very exciting- because we were showing the techniques needed to solve problems and such. recurrence relations are pretty interesting after all~~

reviewed a lot of Character theory today. we have this problem on the homework about a character table you find in the street, and you're not sure what exact ordering of the columns are- you only see two since it is dirty, but you know theres a mistake, and you must correct it. Pelikan said he is fond of this problem, which he created. he said he found this on some american professor's website, e-mailed the professor- who didnt' come up with the problem, and got credit for that!

in cha theory friday we started the proof of Burnside's Thm. this is one of the great milestones of character theory. the theorem states that any group of order p^x*q^y, where p and q are primes, is solvable. the proof is really intense- and uses the concept of field extensions and galois theory, but i think i at least sortof understand it. i did some wikipedi-ing of galois theory, and it really looks very interesting. i feel my chance to take this class is lowering, however, but i'll probably have a talk with the professor the week after spring break to see what he thinks.

reviewed a lot of functional as well. Friday the beginning of class wasn't all that exciting- we did some proofs and then reviewed the homework, but then we started talking about linear algebra. apparently next we will discuss infinite dimensional vector spaces! that excites me. matrices act very differently. i.e. ST=I, but TS!=I. we also talked about the concept of idempotent matrices. (much happy will?)

today i also went to the gym for the first time. it is very nice! it even has a sauna and steam bath. when you go in they give you a key which opens a locker which you can throw your stuff in. I bought a membership for a month- 16 visits. the lady i bought it from spoke just a little english but we got it done anyway! and today i ran 30 minutes and 3.7 km. i didn't shower there today because I didn't really explore that part of the gym before.

took the bus back to the MALL! i haven't been there in a while, and i wanted to go grocery shopping, but it was too late. i had a huuge dinner at the chinese place. i ate duck with sweet and sour sauce, with rice. it was getting late and they had some fried fish. they asked me if i wanted some- for free- and i gladly accepted. i capped off my meal with a vanilla gelato. i was stuffed. i deserved it!

did some more work, including solving some number theory, and trying to prepare for the midterm, even though it doesn't matter for me. watched Terminator- Vic's hand. pretty good episode. i can't believe the next one is the last! i will have to watch it soon.

tomorrow Csaba is having a number theory review class from 8-10. he says it is only a Q&A session. i don't really have many questions, so my goal is to come at 9:15-ish. then i have class until 2. a friend of mine- who i haven't seen since the middle of highschool- is in Budapest tomorrow and tuesday, so hopefully i'll be able to see her.

i'm a little bit tired. maybe i'll have some coffee in the morning to help me survive the wee hours~~

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

YES! IDEMPOTENTS!!!


There's nothing better than a^2 = a