So I realized today that I’ve been neglecting my blog for the past couple of weeks, I’ll make excuses for that later, and I thought that maybe I should make more of an effort to try and post more often. I want to continue using this platform as a journal of sorts, but I also want to get into the habit of posting more mathematical topics as well. I have a lot of material from my talk on Cauchy’s theorem in group theory that I would like to post as well as a couple of problems from analysis that I have found pretty interesting. Hopefully I can get LaTex figured out enough to type up these posts sometime within the next week or so.
As for why I have been neglecting the blog recently. It really is a combination of things. To begin with I have been sick for over a week now…not enough to actually sideline me, but enough that I haven’t really felt productive for over a week now.
Add to that an insane amount of algebra homework. Last quarter I was probably dropping about 6-8 hours a week on algebra homework and this quarter I’ve probably been averaging closer to 12 hours a week. For the first homework I think I turned in a total of 14 pages. Others have required less paper in the end, but have required a lot of effort in order to actually find the solutions. There is one number theory problem from algebra class I want to write a blog post on since the proof was pretty interesting.
Speaking of number theory, I’m not sure if someone said something to the professor or she planned it this way or what, but I have actually enjoyed the last 2 days of class. In the first 3 weeks of class pretty much covered the first chapter of the book and “learned” proof techniques. It was basically foundations, but at a slower pace. Then yesterday she came in and it was like I was in a different class. She started using concepts from abstract algebra and left trivial details to be verified later rather than proving everything in every little detail. I know I wasn’t the only one that was disappointed in this class so I have to wonder if something went on behind the scenes to change how she approached this class.
Along the lines of changing my opinion on a class, I have recently started to enjoy analysis a lot more. Last quarter the professor that I had was pretty much horrible and honestly I haven’t really been very impressed with the analysis professor this quarter, but she has assigned and discussed a lot more interesting things then I had in analysis last quarter. So while analysis still isn’t my favorite subject I can honestly say that I don’t dread having to do analysis homework.