..and sleep well.
News for August 2006
Good night
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.
A good breakfast doesn’t fix everything.
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.