preview: school catches up with life
This will, in all likelihood, be a bad week. I like to think of saturday at a litmus test for the next week's motivation: I rarely get a lot done, but the important issue is more why things didn't get done. Next weekend, for example, I have actual, honest-to-god plans, so not getting stuff done is an unfortunate but necessary part of next saturday. This week, though, I had dinner meeting and not much else. Results? Mixed to not-so-hot. Somehow, the amount of time I can spend messing around with the internet on a given day expands to fill the gaps in my schedule, and with no plans today, I feel like I can't honestly account for the time from when I got up til now. Thus: it portends to be a bad week--not getting stuff done when I had the opportunity (and nobody knocking at my door to take me away from my work) is not good for one's karma.
Having a lot to do this week--asian american lit presentation on wednesday, two extended meetings with thesis advisor tuesday/thursday about what the hell I can talk about for twenty minutes on 2/16 without getting my ass handed to me by well-meaning faculty, the always-imminent creative writing--suggests that this was the last time I can afford to waste.
While I'm talking about my thesis, I just want to note: it reminds me of why it is I ended up majoring in math (besides a long string of coincidences + a lack of direction). Even though we don't have a real logician in our math department (causing my plans for a "mathematical logic" independent study to fall through), I managed to send the thesis swerving into the territory of the abstract, the foundations of mathematics-type stuff.
And despite flinching a little every time someone mistook majoring in history and math for majoring in history of math, I couldn't avoid writing a thesis that drags with it little bits of history and pedagogy, which has always been a source of fascination.
Basically, what happened is I took a topic that was originally picked to be easy and topology-centric. The Jordan Curve Theorem is pretty well done being proved, but it isn't taught in any Pomona math class, so I was planning on using it to make an easy second thesis to complement my difficult history one (since withdrawn/dropped/cancelled). But some kind of germ of academic stubbornness has led me to write about two topics:
1. the consensus "original proof", a 1905 paper that uses all sorts of terms now meaningless and a format that needs some cleanup. The plan is to thoughtfully present the material so that it can be understood by a contemporary audience. Along the way, I often have these doubtful pauses that maybe this wasn't the consensus original proof after all, because my advisor sees things wrong with it for which I have no answer.
2. non-standard analysis, an alternative system for structuring all numbers. Invented in the 1960s, it was originally intended to clean up areas of math like calculus and modeling, but also to be the fulfillment of an intuitive notion that had been around since the 1600s. It has since fallen by the wayside, as mathematical logic is really abstact and more than a little dangerous (a surprising number of logicians over the years have committed suicide, gone crazy, etc), and so it is better left assumed in most math classes/books/careers.
So, in the last few months, a topic that seemed fairly easy, but more importantly seemed 'safe', has turned into a project that scares me, and inasmuch as it covers stuff outside our faculty's expertise, seems ambitious (though more like an overreach than an overachievement). Somehow, just by spending a little time with my subject, something mundane has become a paper that will reflect how I see math, how I wish I could do math, the way I wish I could make math stay a part of my life even though I'm never going to grad school... I get a sense of possession, of ownership. I get a sense of rightness, everything in the place it's meant to go.
Having a lot to do this week--asian american lit presentation on wednesday, two extended meetings with thesis advisor tuesday/thursday about what the hell I can talk about for twenty minutes on 2/16 without getting my ass handed to me by well-meaning faculty, the always-imminent creative writing--suggests that this was the last time I can afford to waste.
While I'm talking about my thesis, I just want to note: it reminds me of why it is I ended up majoring in math (besides a long string of coincidences + a lack of direction). Even though we don't have a real logician in our math department (causing my plans for a "mathematical logic" independent study to fall through), I managed to send the thesis swerving into the territory of the abstract, the foundations of mathematics-type stuff.
And despite flinching a little every time someone mistook majoring in history and math for majoring in history of math, I couldn't avoid writing a thesis that drags with it little bits of history and pedagogy, which has always been a source of fascination.
Basically, what happened is I took a topic that was originally picked to be easy and topology-centric. The Jordan Curve Theorem is pretty well done being proved, but it isn't taught in any Pomona math class, so I was planning on using it to make an easy second thesis to complement my difficult history one (since withdrawn/dropped/cancelled). But some kind of germ of academic stubbornness has led me to write about two topics:
1. the consensus "original proof", a 1905 paper that uses all sorts of terms now meaningless and a format that needs some cleanup. The plan is to thoughtfully present the material so that it can be understood by a contemporary audience. Along the way, I often have these doubtful pauses that maybe this wasn't the consensus original proof after all, because my advisor sees things wrong with it for which I have no answer.
2. non-standard analysis, an alternative system for structuring all numbers. Invented in the 1960s, it was originally intended to clean up areas of math like calculus and modeling, but also to be the fulfillment of an intuitive notion that had been around since the 1600s. It has since fallen by the wayside, as mathematical logic is really abstact and more than a little dangerous (a surprising number of logicians over the years have committed suicide, gone crazy, etc), and so it is better left assumed in most math classes/books/careers.
So, in the last few months, a topic that seemed fairly easy, but more importantly seemed 'safe', has turned into a project that scares me, and inasmuch as it covers stuff outside our faculty's expertise, seems ambitious (though more like an overreach than an overachievement). Somehow, just by spending a little time with my subject, something mundane has become a paper that will reflect how I see math, how I wish I could do math, the way I wish I could make math stay a part of my life even though I'm never going to grad school... I get a sense of possession, of ownership. I get a sense of rightness, everything in the place it's meant to go.
posted by sam at
3:35 PM
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