Warning: MATH AHEAD

I think I’ve submitted the previous entry… IN the spirit of spring break, I’m writing up my blog at the airport, and got it done while I’m waiting for my flight. Memphis was definitely worth the trip. Din see much cos of the short time that I was there, coupled with the 1.5 day conference…

Arrived on fri morn, took a cab down to holiday inn. Wanted to check in at 9am, but there were no clean rooms available, so I went over to the university of Memphis campus (like 2 streets away), registered for the conference. Had a talk with this professor called Tom for a few hours, which involved some chalkboard fun. He showed me some work that he was doing on Hamiltonian paths on the n-D hyper-cube, with certain restrictions involved. His claim is that: Since my computer cannot find a solution for n=15 after running for so long, I conjecture that for n=100 there is no solution.

After that, I went back to check in, and got a nice surprise in the room. Yupz, it’s a 4 star hotel indeed… Theres a living room before you hit the bedroom. Was living in the lap of luxury, though also paying to live in the lap of luxury. Received an email from ioana, some other first year from Uchi that joined me at this conference, saying that she missed her bus and would arrive at 10pm instead.

Headed back for the conference, in which tom was the first speaker. The other two were sort of boring, cos 1 had no material and the other was talking about physics. Thus ended day one (half day). There was a ‘drinks party’ at some prof’s place, but I had no idea of how to get there, so headed back to sleep instead.

Day 2’s lectures were slightly better. 4 in the morn, 4 in the aft. I particurly enjoyed the last 2 of the day, cos they had interesting material which I could follow, and see the intuition and ideas. Here’s an open question: Let S be a set of increasing integers such that the difference between any two consecutive numbers is bounded. Must the set of numbers consisting of the integers – S contain a geometric progression?

After that, there was a party at Provost Ralph’s place. Luckly we met up with some UoM students Doug and Andrew, who gave us a lift down. Before that, we got a car ride around the place, visiting some park, the ‘getto’, etc. Dinner at Ralph’s house was great, seeing the old professors eating and discussing math, which the rest of us were mixing around. The students mostly set around a table playing with some of those brain teasers. This would have been a great place to bring set. Slightly reminisant of IMO.

After that, we were bugging Doug about what could be done in Memphis. Apparantly nothing… We eneded up driving to Walgreen (Hopefully none of them reads this, but driving to WalMart ….. oh well) It’s more of just having fun together I guess, than anything. Headed back to the hotel room, was quite late, sat around and chatted. Then we watched south park (The WalMart episode) and introduced Doug to Happy Tree Friends. It sounds like nothing much, but I think the night activities were the best part of this trip.

A question that Ioana was asking quite often was : Is this how we will end up? Not a particularly interesting prospect, but its an indication of a possible future. Something to think about.

Oh, and had a chat with Charmaine justifying my calling the IMO 2005 team brats. I explained that it’s a term of endearment…

The posts are gonna get shorter as i get busy in this upcoming quarter ....