August 2006

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Good night

..and sleep well.

Like a rock being ground down into dust.

Honours is indeed hard. It isn’t so much the difficulty of the subjects, I can handle the level of maths provided I study. The problem is keeping up.

It moves so fast. I have to spend all day every day studying. Then I discover I haven’t done a thing on my thesis all week. Yesterday I left uni at 10pm, got home had dinner, sat around for half an hour, then crashed. I slept like shit though because my mind couldn’t stop thinking about the maths problems I’d just worked on. So then I slept in and missed the morning of study.

I think the key to not going insane will be to grapple onto the thing I am doing at the time, forget about progress, and just trust in planning that I will come out the other side each week.

Iff

I’ve been riding my bike around recently, push bike and motorbike. I love them both. I need lights for my bicycle. Maybe I can get some tonight?

Anyway I have some proofs to finish, then some typing, then some reading to do first.

I think I’m being careful what I say, because I don’t want to jinx things. I don’t want to talk about things I’m doing until I’ve done them.

In other news, archery is fun and consuming, but I think I’ve decided not to buy some new limbs. I can’t really afford them, and I’m not sure I even really need them. Consumer therapy my make me buy them in the future.

You still have to do something with your day, so you can pat yourself on the back when it’s over.

I am awkward.

Big wall of maths

I am suddenly faced with an all consuming beast that is modern algebra.

I have just looked into definitions of the determinant for linear tranformations on real vector spaces. Now I’m delving into the determinant for commutative rings. I find when I’m reading up on things I am constantly asking myself “what the fuck does that mean?”

Time to learn about fields, rings, modules, tensor products, exterior products. bla bla.

The grand goal so far is a general definition of the determinants which applies for non-commutative rings, and the nicer more friendly algebras. There is one, but I can’t follow it at all.