Lots of cool classes

Hello again!

I think this week is the last blog post which makes me very sad. I’ve really enjoyed these last 10 weeks doing research (and not attending school). It’s crazy to think that my time at BASIS has already come. But ok, I know what you’re thinking right now. Where is the math?

I have had quite the hectic week. Differential Geometry on Tuesday was difficult for me and I have not had any time to review.

Starting Wednesday, I left for my visit to Stanford. It has been really fun as I’ve been meeting up with all my friends here and sitting in on amazing math lectures. I’ll give a brief summary of the classes and what I learned in them.

Graph Theory: I had seen most of the material before in math class in ninth grade, but I learned a lot of cool theorems about Hamiltonian cycles ( paths that go through every vertex exactly once in a graph) and their relationship with the degree ( the number of edges attached) of vertices. Graph theory has a lot of cool applications in social networking and computer science as well for those interested!

Abstract Algebra: I had already seen all the material before (thanks to Ms. Bailey), but the lecture was nice. It focused on relations (homomorphisms) between mathematical objects called groups.

Algorithms: Technically this is a computer science class but it’s actually a math class. I learnt about different sorting algorithms and compared their worst case times. I learnt about Big-O and Big-Omega notation which would actually end up helping for my next class.

Analytic Number Theory: After feeling good about understanding the previous three lectures well, I (stupidly) decided to attend a much more difficult class. This class was hard. I understood sentences and bits of proofs, but for the most part I was very lost. Apparently math uses Big-O and Big-Omega notation as well.

Representation Theory: I normally would not understand anything in this class, since it has a lot of prerequisites. However, luckily for me, today was the first day of category theory. I now (2 years after category theory) know the definition of a category. Things Ms. Bailey said way back when make sense now.

All these classes were really cool  (even the ones I did not understand) so feel free to ask me if you want to know anything about them.

As for nim, I’ve wrapped up and cleaned up my program. My equation is still ugly, but my result is somewhat neat. J

That’s all for now!

Thanks for reading~