Quarter Life Crisis

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Science Miscellanea

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Summer school Our summer school just ended in a talk titled Miscellanea but actually being the cumulation of all the preceding talks. Quite interesting, quite hard to understand, and definitely not really understood by myself at this stage. As the topic seems to be close to current research, I don't feel more stupid than usual because of that.

And to cheer things up a little, towards the end we saw less of stable homotopy groups (objects about which I learned over lunch that they're both great for their formal properties and and a pain to actually compute...) but more familiar things like the Weitzenböck formula.

To cheer things up even more, I meant to post this link for weeks: Einstein archives, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I haven't looked into it in depth yet but it looks like a very promising source, containing scanned Einstein manuscripts. While I tend to think that it's the content of the text that matters, being able to peek over Einstein's shoulder right into his lecture notes simply is very cool. It's these sites that make the web worthwhile.

Slightly less sophisticated but probably a good read for those casually interested in mathematics is this text on (countable) infinity at Kuro5hin. While people may disagree on the presentation, I think it proves that mathematical subjects can easily be engaging, even for people who consider themselves 'bad at maths'. They also have an introductory bit on projective geometry. Not quite as engaging for the layman but a very nice topic.

June 12, 2003, 20:30

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