Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« Short course day 4MainWhose »

Short course day 5

388 words on

The last day of our short course. People are a bit tired by now and the morning is a bit of a rush as we have to vacate our rooms, return the keys and put our luggage in the seminar room abused for its storage before lectures start.

The last lecture ended in a remark referencing to the 27 lines on a cubic – a topic that had been covered in one of the first lectures on Monday. Gave a nice 'closed' feeling to the whole thing.

The lecture styles were quite different throughout the course. Ranging from very structured, with no statement being made without it getting its own number first to rather free-style and non-linear. The latter is probably a result of presenting things top-down, by giving results first and then digressing along the way to fill all the gaps. While this is more interesting to listen to, it's almost impossible to walk out of such a lecture with a comprehensible set of notes.

We attempted a couple of more exercises in the afternoon, getting stuck on one that looked rather easy to begin with. Discussing it with other people and the lecturer suggested that the proof, which mainly needed some kind of clever estimate, wasn't easy at all (we didn't really manage to do it in the end). It seemed though, that conceptually the geometric part of the problem wasn't hard, while the arithmetics needed to actually make it work were the problem.

I went back to Coventry together with James (who hosts a funny Fight Club meets mathematics film called Maths Club on his site). We were very lucky with all the trains. In all three of Bath, Bristol and Birmingham they were always about to depart when we reached the platform and got on them.

Getting onto the platform in Bath was quite tricky though, as they actually wanted to see my ticket before letting me go there. And then I had to argue with the guy that the ticket I had specifically bought to take any possible route from Bath (at a higher price) is fine. And he wouldn't be satisfied before looking the fare up in a huge book. Morons.

Paul picked me up at the station and Andy and Tim came over for some pizza and drinks which was nice.

September 19, 2003, 23:53

Tagged as uni.

Add your comment

« Short course day 4MainWhose »

Comments on

Photos

Categories

Me

This page

Out & About

pinboard Links

People

Ego-Linking