Finally

So here i am lazing around in my bed :) ahhhh ... Its been one crazy week, with so many things happening. Time to slow down, take a check on things.

First, i lost a 'friend' over the weekend. Long complicated story, messy details. But that sortof unbalanced me for a few days, but its alright now. Yea, and 'friend' is in inverted commas cos its more of an acquantaince than anything, and besides the wavelength connection wasn't just not there, but jamming signals were sent even when there was. Yea, so maybe its for the better. Shouldn't change me much i think. On and this note, mom i love you.

Second, the REU is finally over. this past week has been a crazy rush of SEASME duties, attending lectures, working on problems, preparing presentations, writing papaers, attending presentations, sleeping late, waking early. But its all over now. Bloody REU has screwed up my sleep cycle, well the stupid light too. Nowadyas im up by 7am. 7 bloody freaking am. Thats the time that i used to go to sleep back in the good old days of yesteryear b4 i came to UoC. oh well ... the REU was great fun actually. And i think i deserve a break before plunging back into this madness once again in autumn.

Third, so i have been working on a math problem over the entire summer. Its damn comical how my work has progressed. Without delving into the details, starting with the problem, i made an observation. It took me 2 weeks of insane algebra, guesses, ugly inductions and such to prove that result. I was quite happy with it, and tried to get more progress on the question. Everything else i tried didn't work, and i tried lots of stuff. Was thinking about it on and off for several weeks. We had to do a presentation in the 8th week, so i showed this result to my mentor in the 6th week, along with the 'ugly' (well, when you see the ideas, its quite nice and interesting, but just tedious) calculations. Then my mentor was like, 'oh, this is trivial.' And he proceeded to derive that result in a few lines of linear algebra. I was flabbergasted, and of course sad, as is often the case when someone shows you how trivial your result is had you known something else... And so my mentor had me prepare a presentation on a completely different topic, from a book that i have been reading over summer. I settled the details, practiced my presentation, and everything was set on tuesday of 8th week. Come wednesday, i suddenly had a stroke of divine intervention and created something that i really needed to solve the problem. It's constuction was VERY wishful thinking, and based on such small cases that its hard to see how i generalized it. With that, and several other details that had been developed over the week, i felt that i had a correct proof of the original question. I told my mentor on wed night, that 'Erm, i think i'd rather present the problem, because i few i can show it'. My mentor siad 'Thats a very bad idea, because no one likes to see so much calculations in a presentation. If you want to write up a paper, id read it and check your details.' And so i promised to think about it. I figured he didn't understand me, so wed night was spent in a flurry of activity to type up my solution. Ugh i hate \LaTeX cos im so not used to it still. Was finally done with it at 1am, with lots of help. My brain had been overworking since 5pm (not to mention SESAME duties from 9-4), and hence, as usual, had trouble falling asleep... Woke up the next day, sent an emial to my mentor with my paper, told him that im doing the presentation on the problem. He shot back with an email saying its a really bad idea. 2 hours later, he sent back an email 'Oh, i din see your attachment the first time. This is quite nice actually. Here are some suggestions to how you can improve your paper (and all that ugly calculations you have). But still, you should present on the book.' I met my mentor at 4, in which he gave me a crash course in the linear algebra needed to simplify my work, trahsed through the other details. He also did some computer work, and gave me a geometric explanation to why the matrix i created was the one i needed. (On hindsight, that was really what i wanted and needed over the past weeks, but was too inexperienced to know how to do it.) At 5, we started preparing another presentation (for this problem, cos iwas like, erm i really really wanna do this ...) The gist of it was out at 6, and then i started to fill in the details of what i would say, in what order and such. By then, word was out that i had solved the problem, and people were expecting a presentation of it. Hence, we decided that a presentation of the main theorem used to prove the problem was all that was necessary, so that the rest would go read my paper if they were interested. Then at 7 i gave my presentation :) It was very short and sweet, and had much more useful details that some of the others. I proved that nice theorem, was done, and left many people wondering how does the question fit in at all :) Kudos to my mentor for that stressful wed/thurs when i must have frightened him terribly. But it all worked out in the end :) Finished editing my paper on friday, and have it nicely written up. Its a short 3 pages, compared to the 10 pages of fluff some other people are creating. Haha, as you can tell im very proud of this. I owe it to several strokes of brillance and weeks of working at it.

kk, off to cook lunch