Personal Blogs

This is it — the final push. Finish work at two, home, nap and then the final surface unit. Tomorrow there are three or four questions that I need to revise. After that it's just the exam.

And then of course it's the groups...

I read a number theory unit in the bath today, and I suspect that it will be bedtime reading tonight.

I don't suppose that this is too dire—it is maths.

For now it's back to the fractals...

I'm too sloppy.

Yesterday I went to my topology tutorial, which gave me a lot of hope. Nothing was exterior to the closure of the open ball that is my understanding zone [wee topology-joke there].

Afterwards we went to the pub and chatted stuff, then, wonderfully, Ford and his M209ers arrived. I needed to head home but I imagine that much talking and drinking happened after I'd left. I certainly hope so.

Today I bracketed about five hours of revision around a couple of hours of walking to-and-from my school and putting away exam desks.

There was much mumbling about sequences in topological spaces going on during this work-walk process—I still don't get these, I suspect that I'm missing something obvious.

So sloppy?

I started some solitaire stuff the other day. What I posted isn't wrong, the topology is probably the right one, nothing I say is an outright lie. But in every other way it is wrong.

As I work my way through the books I notice the, slightly, wrong assumptions that I have made along the way. Sloppy.

As soon as I thought about how I would code it I saw where I had gone wrong. I'll leave the tripe that I wrote-up up, but I'm going to have take some time to think about this.

[For affecionados I created a topological space that wasn't Hausdorff, so it couldn't be a metric space. And yet I wanted a metric.

I think that this is the right topological space to consider, we just have to forget about a metric. A metric which is difficult anyway.]

Four hours of topology, coming slowly but I have hope.

It's amazing the amount of wee subtleties that I missed first time round. Re-reading the first units has started to make some of the stuff that bothered me in the later units gel.

Tomorrow is going to be a hellish day, big split shift: start at six in the morning finish at midnight and then back to work for eight the next morning. It isn't that that's really bothering me, I've dealt with that before. Tomorrow Danny is taken from me. He is now surplus.

He'll go to green-pastures new, I hope he'll be happy. Still, life will not be the same without him. We enjoyed and supported each others weaknesses, we appreciated each others strengths, we had a laugh.

He is almost all of the reason that I've been able to cope this year when I so didn't last year. We could always lean on each other.

I know we'll stay in touch but we might never work together again. I've loved many people, few to none have I ever enjoyed working with.

[I'm tired, I should be writing this for the nonsense but I can't be bothered schleping HTML tonight. So you're stuck with my tripe here. It will be nonsense to most. Perhaps to all?]

The toplogy TMA will not be finished; one and a half units/questions undone, and the thing to be posted by 17:30 Thursday—not going to happen.

Tonight I managed thirteen of the hardest marks that I may never get. Still I had a light-bulb moment. [This is a live TMA so I'm going to obfuscate this.]

For some reason I thought that I could manage a proof-by-contradiction (sometimes I can) after a while I realized that, while I was right, [I knew that from the way the question was worded] this wasn't going to work out. Where to now?

That's the problem with topology—the tool kit is too big. And you don't know what some of the tools are really for. And you often pick the wrong tool.

For example, tonight I needed to show that some set in some space was bounded, that would be the General Extreme Value theorem then? No! that says that something entirely different. So ... what? Monotone convergenge, that isn't even listed in the hand book ... do I really need to show that this is bounded?

People who know this stuff will guess the method that I used. Weierstrass and his ilk may have been the rightest of the right but they have blown the brains of generations of undergrads. Maybe that's our due?

When this course finishes I won't be walking away from topology. This course has been too-far too-fast but I've always seen maths as a girl...a girl like me, a girl who likes me.

And...

of topology.

And you know what? I'm happy. Some of the solutions that I've produced today are the best solutions that I've ever produced. [I think, we'll see]

Usually I'm a four-page answer type-of guy. Today I've rarely gone beyond a single page, even for seven marks.

I could be utterly wrong. Actually I couldn't; I could be wrong, but when it comes to maths I can no longer be utterly wrong.

Jings. What have I just said?

If I have scored every mark, I have fifty. I have less than a week to do what took me a month.

The funny thing is that I think that this is possible.

I was working my way through uniform convergent/point convergent sequences of functions. We don't seem to care what space we are in any more. My brain is beyond hurt with thinking. Then I saw something. I played a few games of solitaire and I think that I'm right.

There comes a point place when you can remove enough pegs so that a single peg finish isn't possible any more. I can't prove this but there's some limit condition here I'm sure. I'd love to know where that place is. Which might mean that there is always a point convergent sequence of functions under a certain limit? Mmmmm.

Dammit neil, build that app properly! It's not as if you haven't had years and years to do so.

Jumping, jumping, Neo. Still I have a shining new tool for my toolbox. And my personal madness is burning bright once again.

I woke with the sudden realization that I'd been missing something important. As we walked to last Saturday's tutorial Graham said something along the lines of, "...or you create your own internal words for...".

Which is something that I usually do, but haven't been doing lately. What does that mean?