## Archive for the ‘university’ Category

### The evolution of a solution

March 25, 2013

As a TA, I sometimes TA for a course whose coursework has no ready solutions. Then the following happens.

*

Iteration 0: No solution. These problems are impossible. The lecturer is a sadist. These are his research problems.

Iteration 1: Death is the only solution.

Iteration 2: Hey, if we know “A” this problem is easily solved. Hooray!

Iteration 3: Oh, “A” follows from this problem. Dang.

Iteration 4: If we assume “B” is known, this is both easy and elegant!

Iteration 5: If we assume “B”, we’re assuming something not known or proven on this course!

Iteration 6: It’s one page if I hand-wave the hard part!

Iteration 7: It’s three pages and no hand-waving!

Iteration 8: It’s three pages, no hand-waving, and assuming $1 < 0$ holds!

Iteration 9: Hang on a minute, this is not a problem about “X”. That’s why no “X”-literature had a peep of it.

Iteration 10: This is about “Y”! And it’s an easy “Y”-problem!

Iteration 11: Three lines, easy peasy… aw crap, that inequality’s not strict.

Iteration 12: Three lines, plus eleven special cases, can this really be— (phone rings)

Iteration 13: “Misprint, Mr. Lecturer? The one in Problem 3, right? Right right. What? I meant the inequality… oh, that’s a different misprint?”

Iteration 14: It’s not an “Y”-problem. It’s an “X”-problem, and the zero was clever misdirection for infinity.

Iteration 15: I have… a solution? A skeleton anyway; let’s throw some meat on this pony!

Iteration 16: It’s a elephant. I can’t give this solution to the little ones. First thing, my wrist would break at the blackboard.

Iteration 17: I could use transparencies… Wait, no, I’d better try simplifying this. Get some jumping jacks, elephant solution!

Iteration 18: Right, I don’t need the special case where $r>1$ and $r<-1$; silly me.

Iteration 19, the homework meeting: “Mmh, yeah. You can prove it that way too.” (crushes paper, cries a silent tear, moves to the next problem)

*

Iteration 19 can be averted by having a handout. (“Yeah, I guess you could use the obvious, elegant solution Mr. Poopypants put on the blackboard. If on the other hand you want a solution with pizazz and loxodromic Möbius transformations… well, one out of two ain’t too bad… here’s a handout… Aw, come on people, don’t you have saunas to set fire to or something?”)

### The mathematical life, part aleph

March 11, 2013

A harmonic function, for the purposes of this discussion, is a function $f$ for which $\Delta f = 0$. A superharmonic function is one for which $\Delta f \leq 0$, and a subharmonic one one for which $\Delta f \geq 0$. Consequently, a function is harmonic if and only if it is both superharmonic and subharmonic.

Thus, a superharmonic function is (generally speaking) not harmonic.

When I explained this to the teaching-of-mathematics studying fellow the next desk over, his comment was: “Are you telling me that Superman isn’t even a man?”

(To which I should have said, “He’s from Krypton, isn’t he? I don’t even know if we should call him a he! What the hell, he might have tentacles or nothing at all down there — wait, let me check, there must be fan fiction about this. Let me google for ‘superman duck penis’.”)

To which I answered, “Ja, but if ve take der Super-Man und der Sub-Man, they together make a Man!”

*

A question, from the same discussion: As is well known, a topologist is a person who doesn’t know the difference between a donut and a coffee cup. This being so because in the topological sense they’re the same thing: if they were made of clay, you could morph one into the other without destroying or introducing any holes. (A donut has one, in the middle; a coffee cup has one, in the handle.)

The question now rises, how many holes should a donut have to be topologically equivalent to a human being?

Probably more than one, as the digestive pathway, mouth to fartmaker, is not the only one. But this quickly becomes a quest into the insides of the human being; it is not clear to me if even the male and the female of the species are topologically equivalent. (Either “Physiological gender as a topological concept” or “The topological equivalence of the sexes: Towards a mathematical feminism”, forthcoming once I get the funding.)

Research into this is on hiatus because the damn biologists, who surely have the requisite expertise, are far away across the frozen waste in a different building.

### My daily life: communication and solutions

September 27, 2012

A day at the math department. Midday. I go to the toilet to drop excrement and read Twitter. That done, I reach into the toilet paper conch.

It’s empty.

Well, reaching deep within I can feel the cardboard tube, but that’s no good for wiping.

For I moment I just sit there, dull surprise on my face.

Then I read some more Twitter and FMyLife, resisting a slight urge to comment on one of those about my position.

Then, when there are no particular sounds of footsteps from the corridor, I crack the cubicle door open and reach into the antechamber, the likewise closet-sized pre-toilet with a handwashing basin and a single male-peeing bowl. (I realize my terminology is weird; but you rarely read or talk about toilets.) There on the wall, two paces away, next to the corridor/toilet door, is a dispenser for hand towels.

Paper hand towels. And not the sandpapery kind either, but the nice ones. (If it had been the sandpaper towels, I might have resorted to some real commando methods.)

I calculate — one human being, two hands; one needed for ripping out a stack of towels, one needed for keeping the door closed, one needed to keep my underpants awkwardly halfway up, covering the worm and the dumplings.

Left for towels, right for pants; mercifully nobody picks these four seconds for a time to come in.

I wipe, the toilet eats the towels without too much burping; and as I stand up I really notice something I had glanced at coming in: a wadded, unused paper towel, like the last of a bunch held by a sweaty hand, in the nook between the seat and the wall.

Apparently, it seems, I was not the first to resort to these methods.

And as I walk out, a physics assistant rushes past me, into the toilet. For a split second I try to find a polite way to tell him ERMAHGERD THERE’S NO TOILET PAPER; but a split second isn’t enough.

Besides, it’s a problem with a proven solution; and as a mathematician, I’m happy with that.

### My textbook expenses

September 19, 2012

For a M.Sc. in mathematics
(rather, a B.Sc./M.Sc. equivalent combo)

1. about 30 euros (I think) for an optional textbook on basic analysis (Thomas’ Calculus, Finney-Weir-Giordano, 10th ed); lecturer-organized mass buy.
2. maybe 100–200 euros over five years for officially xeroxed lecture notes; including a math major and physics and IT minors.

*

For a Ph.D. in mathematics
(assuming nothing surprising pops up)

1. about 20 euros for one relevant actual-real-math book.

*

So yes, when I hear what kind of monstrous rip-offs the textbook expenses of other fields can be, I am boggled and furious. I’d say “required” and “expensive” are a particularly unfortunate combination; but of course the combination is not a result of fortune. (A cause of a fortune? I wonder if the bigger American-style universities publish their own obligatory textbooks, or if the publishers extend some kind of considerations to them. Heck, a lone lecturer could print  his/hers at Lulu for 50 dollars a book, and sell them for 100 — mad profit! 50 bucks per student, and you could use last year’s notes! Bwa ha ha—)

(Wait, I slipped into the “amoral space-lizard” mode there for a bit. Let me center my energies and be “forward-looking mathematician” again.)

When I become a big and important mathematician, I shall conspire with a publisher to print a flimsy textbook that shall be obligatory for my courses, and expensive, and we shall share the obscene profits. Then my students shall rebel and crucify me against the blackboard; and I shall live in the memories of mathematicians as a martyr to teaching, forever.

*

“Hey, holes in the blackboard. Guess it’s really true we don’t have money.”

“Shut your piehole, first-year. They’re holy.”

“Holes usually are.”

“No, you twit. Holy as in holy moly, if the maintenance papered them over the head would have a stroke.”

“Feet usually don’t—”

“The head of the department. You know, tall, thin, white, bald… like a piece of chalk wrapped in a sweater.”

“I know, I’ve seen her.”

“Have you heard her?”

“Does she speak?”

“Only math.”

“But really, what are these holes about?”

“Teaching went wrong here.”

“What, someone in physics used TNT and their thumb to demonstrate acceleration?”

“I have no idea what you just said, first-year.”

“Oh right, forgot you have no minors, just a big-huge math major. Sorry; that was real world stuff.”

“Ah, the special case. Nevermind then. This was where a lecturer got feedback. These holes are where the nails went.”

“What now?”

“We’ve stopped asking for feedback since. Also, see this sign.”

“What, ‘Absolutely no hammers in the hall’?”

“Yes, none. Hammertime is in the past.”

### Back to the salt mines

July 30, 2012

First day at work after the holiday; back at the thesis. The preface has come from this to this:

*

An academic life is much like that of a butterfly. You begin as a larva, mindlessly crawling around; then you graduate into the life of a precious, fragile butterfly. Then you enter graduate school, much as the butterfly is captured by a deft lepidopterist; and a cruel needle pierces you and you are left to waste away in a dusty glass-fronted cabin somewhere, forever.

Then, when all hope has been lost and your relatives have nearly stopped asking you when you’ll graduate, you do. Or die. In either case, if reports from the other side are to be believed, what had been an uncertain, soul-crushing existence of arbitrary injustices and humiliations becomes even more so.

I wish to thank, and indeed I do thank my advisor name removed for his endless patience.

Also, thanks to the people who have given me money. I love money. I love it! Euros and dollars, marks and zloty, yen and whatever, there’s nothing I adore as much as cash!

I thank my parents, brothers, uncles, cousins, and Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation. May death come swiftly to his enemies. And all you people who have asked me over the years some variation of this question: ”What is it that you do over there at the university?” — well, this is the book you are gonna get if you ask me now. C’mon punks, do ya feel lucky?

*

Needs work; I suppose the advisor would say, “A little bit too political. Maybe ‘May death come smoothly to his enemies’, I don’t think swiftness has been proven yet. Maybe quasi-smoothly outside a set of finite Leninesque measure if you want to hedge things”.

No, wait, I suppose the advisor would say, “What the fuck?”

March 29, 2012

One of our math profs is retiring soon — dear Richard, it feels so wrong to think someone who has been there always won’t be, soon — and as a consequence there has been the usual collecting-signatures-to-a-card and pennies-for-a-small-gift routine.

Which led me to think: I don’t think there’s any manufacturer of congratulatory cards that makes one specifically for retiring academics.

There’s a potential for huge profits there. Why, every academician retires sooner or later! Even Morbo the Immortal, professor of chirurgy at Stuttgart for five centuries, is an emeritus now!

So here are a few suggestions.

* * *

(front:) Whenever you gave a lecture, we grimaced…

(inside:) …because it would always end too soon!

*

Whenever we publish, we’ll think of you. (heart)

*

Your impact factor is a million… in our hearts.

*

Dear Professor _____________,

I am pleased to inform you that your paper “Everyone loves me” has been accepted for publication in Journal of True Statements.

The referee had nothing to correct or comment on, because everyone loves you.

Yours sincerely,

Luna Love-love
Editor-in-Chief
J. True Stat.

*

(star) Best Professor of Retirement Ever (star)

*

WE’LL KEEP REFERENCING YOU!!!

*

At last you have time for research.

Be happy!

*

You get to rest; the dean doesn’t. Good news, eh?

*

The Administration is says you were a loyal hard worker and devoted to quality and blah and university brand. They say this is a happy occasion.

It really is; you never need to deal with them fuckers ever again.

Happy retirement! Death to administration! Chalk fist salute!

*

No more teaching ____________ !

No more _______ ________ students of _________ !

You lucky dog!

*

When we were sharing it with you, coffee was only the second most important thing in the world.

Talking with you was number one. This is not a romantic confession.

Though if it was, we wouldn’t mind all that much.

Great, now this card has turned into potential sexual harassment.

We all love you… but not like that!

### Independence is not good for some people

March 25, 2012

So lecturer X, for whose course “Coursename A” I am the teaching assistant, is away on a research retreat at Mt. Wolfdoom. This leaves me to spellcheck, photocopy and supervise the final exam.

I am so fighting the temptation to add one more question to the test.

Possibly this:

Essay. Inner products and me. (6 p.)

Or this:

Let P be the set of polynomials with real coefficients. What is the third element of P? (6 p.)

Or this:

Do you feel this course will prove to be useful in your professional life? (6 p.)

For the person that has not given in to the Darkness Which Is Math, the first question is ludicrous; the second nonsensical; and the third is a standard stupidity from the course evaluation form, made more exciting by the promise/threat of six points hanging in the balance.

— but probably I will resist this temptation, because after the test is over (ha!) I’ll scan the produced chickenfeet into pdf, and send them to Mt. Wolfdoom. And then thunder will flash over the mountain, and a voice dead cold and inhuman will utter many bad words.

Then again, if I said this special extra question should be answered on a separate sheet of paper…

Or if I handed out a special sheet which was the answer sheet for that question in itself —

(E1) What is the biggest natural number?

1. one
2. two
3. four

(E2) The exam supervisor is thinking of a function. Write that function here:f(x) = __________

1. Correct.
2. Incorrect.
3. I don’t know.

1. Correct.
2. Incorrect.
3. I don’t know.

1. Correct.
2. Incorrect.
3. I don’t know.

Once you think a while about the chain of those last questions, you may shudder. (“Well, I don’t know the function so for E3 “I don’t know” if my guess was correct. But what if it was? Then should I choose both “I don’t know” and “Correct”, and do I get partial credit from choosing just one? Should I hazard a guess? And if my answer is just partially correct, what do I answer the next one?”)

It’s a soluble problem, I think, but it would cause some twitching.

### The right to define

March 17, 2012

There are many things that have no natural cause: many things that are the way they are because people have agreed to have them that way. Nowhere is this more true than among mathematicians.

For example, the average height of a population is a simple mathematical calculation, once the population is well defined. (Over time it is a function; at least logarithmically Hölder continuous, and possibly smooth.) But the “normal height” for a population? Why, that is whatever the relevant authority decides a “normal height” to be.

Thus in mathematics the meaning of “an important discovery” is largely dependent on the person using the term; see “Important discovery in the fridge”, dept. mailing list, last week — versus “Important discovery: Destruction of Earth imminent”, math-phys. mailing list, this week.

Among mathematicians, this “right to define” has been restricted, as otherwise the results would not be pleasant. Thus only the departmental head has the right to redefine the zero hour: that is, she gets to define midnight. This is not as sexy as it sounds; merely that if she chooses midnight to be 2 pm outside time (“on the rube clock”), then 8 o’clock is 10 pm outside time, and that’s when the workday starts.

Others are not allowed to mess with the official departmental time; this has been so ever since an adjunct professor redefined his workday into a singularity and retired five minutes later.

A particularly haunting case of redefining time is the sad life of the graduate student who, due to circumstances entirely his own fault, is set to graduate in February of 1993, as soon as that comes around. Opinion is divided on whether the intransigence of his professor is admirable or abominable; the main lesson of the case is thought to be this: never let Microsoft Word’s autocomplete anywhere close to your study plan, and always proofread everything before signing.

Fields laureates, that is, those that get awarded the Fields Medal, the Nobel of mathematics, customarily have the added privilege of defining category boundaries. For an example why this is a privilege best restricted to a small set of sophisticated, sensible people, see von Sturmleben’s paper, “All penii larger than mine are ‘wangi’; by definition I have the largest penis”, Acta Math., 185 (2000) no. 2, 287–290.

As for a more mundane case of time, borderline on the departmental-head powers, who hasn’t heard a math professor exclaim, “Just a minute! I redefine a minute to be fifteen minutes.”?

And who hasn’t heard the inevitable adjunct, popping out of thin air, sneering: “So ya define x to be 15x? Solve for x, and a minute is nothing! Ya have no time! Come on now pops we gots no time!

Or the assistant, similarly appearing, crowing: “So a minute is a zero unit? Then so are all other measures of time! All of time appears in this one and same instant then! Let’s go see Shakespeare, born living and dead, right now!”

Or the lowly lecturer, shuffling to view, moaning with his hands thrust forwards: “Ah truly then this job not only feels like centuries, but is centuries — millennia — endless spans of futile, frustrating toil!”

Ah, such is the playful nature of mathematicians, for certain definitions of “playful”.

One may wonder why mathematics departments all over the world — for they all are like this — have not descended into utter anarchy as the result of the right to define. This is a question whose answer is trivial; mathematicians like their definitions to be well-defined, with nice analogues to the definitions of other people (read: mathematicians), and as the result any department exists in a slowly fluctuating state of collaborative insanity, shared by the inmates (read: faculty), and as is well known, this is but the Earth in microcosm.

After all, to offer one final example, money is a ludicrously fictional concept, made even sillier by the antics of loans and trading in futures and so on; and yet the vast majority of humanity treats money as something which makes sense! Mathematicians have long since seen through this madness, and thus require in salary only enough for basic needs plus writing implements; which the ever at least slightly puzzled administration is happy to give.

### The academic Dungeons & Dragons substitute vocabulary

February 28, 2012

In a recent tweet, I referred to some physicists as “gremlins”. This is not derogatory, but rather an example of the ancient and well-established “Academic Dungeons & Dragons substitute vocabulary”. (He said with the smile of a car insurance encyclopedia salesman.)

In this vocabulary, physicists are gremlins, mathematicians goblins, and applied mathematicians, naturally, hobgoblins. Chemists are gnomes; statisticians kobolds (or if particularly dry, mummies), biologists are gnolls; and so on.

Each field has its own subdivisions: for example, in biology those given to wild extrapolation are known, as per the old joke,  as “grassy gnolls”, and in mathematics the “goblin” that is the principal investigator (PI) of a research group is known as “Gringotts” for some obscure reason.

Social sciences people are elves; the antipathy between elfin and orcish races may or may not have an analogue in academic life. Those human-related pursuits especially abhorrent to hard science are populated by the drow: like elves, but with spiders.

Those engaged in divinity studies are known as ghouls; this is not atheistic prejudice, but a reference to the medieval belief that theologians eat their own dead.

The university administration is led by the chancellor / headmaster / Boss Nass, referred to as the Dragon; under his wings the PR department (trolls) and the personnel department (yugoloths) brood and crouch and bide. Between these types and the common academicians are layers of “draconic creatures” of middle management: dracotaurs, draconians, landwyrms and the like; the exact usage varies from place to place.

The various types of dean and faculty head have their own bywords: particularly experienced types are “liches”, while those with interests in efficiency and reorganization are called “illithids”. (The perhaps not well known Dungeons and Dragons race of illithids, or mind flayers, eats the brains of other creatures and makes them their mindless, groaning, stumbling slave spawn. Why this name had been assigned to this type of management is not known.)

Graduate students are known as oozes or, in the case of those with a slipping schedule, as mold.

Secretaries are secretaries. They are subtle, and quick to anger.

The astute reader may have noticed all of the races and types mentioned above are at best humanoid, but not quite human; this is intentional. The roles of humanity are left to the small folk, i.e. the students. The usual “character classes” of a role-playing game are used as shorthand to refer to the most common types of students, like this:

“Warriors” — those that do enormous amounts of work: making notes, highlighting random passages, diving head first at exercises, using every minute of exam time, and so on. As can be expected of warriors, these time allotments are not always intelligent or successful; but they are done with such gusto.

“Mages” / “Sorcerers” etc. — these students come up, almost preternaturally, with solutions from beyond the reach of normal studentdom. Their essays deviate from the norm; their calculations are not what the TA anticipated. One suspects they have a spellbook; their methods certainly are not from any book the lecturer or the TA has ever seen. Most often their approaches are wrong and stupid, but they have a certain mystique.

“Rogues” — this type has the exact same essays and answers as one of the other types. The reason should be obvious.

“Clerics” — these slightly uptight types adhere to a higher code of conduct; some pamphlet given out by the university PR department possibly. They have faith in the regulations and the rules, and a mystic hunger for knowing all the details of the course’s organization and scoring. It is not uncommon for these poor literalists to become martyrs to their cause, once they try to play their feeble rules against the Darkness That Is Dean.

“Rangers” — this type of student navigates in difficult terrain, and does not kowtow to clocks or calendars. They emerge from their rangings about ten minutes after the start of the lecture, cracking the door open with a loud squeak; they have a tendency to have everything going on at the same time, leaving them running from place to place, and popping up from wild brush to ask for make-up exercises and alternate dates; as a result, their academic output is like talking to animals.

Finally, there are “Bards”, who are voluble, loquacious, and ever eager to explain themselves in ways that do not involve the actual content of the course. As in the game, their explanations are usually if not wholesale then at least generously embellished with fiction.

It is to be wished that students would “role play” or actually desire to learn about their chosen subject; but many are “munchkins” instead, focusing on a raw calculus of credits and exams, seeking to “power game” their way to a degree. (Here the word munchkin is not used to refer to Ozian brightly-attired comic dwarfs; though some would argue otherwise.)

Common study strategies of students are relying on the abilities or notes of their elders (“power leveling”), repeating courses (“grinding”), taking advantage (if possible) of grading on a curve (“PK”), and asking for extra credit (“griefing”). When the exam then comes around, students may “roll one” and define integration as a function adapting into society; or “roll a natural twenty” and pass the course. (Some may “fail the saving throw against clock” and not show up for the exam at all.)

The place where this all takes place, the university, is of course “the dungeon”. Whether there is any authority one might call a Dungeon Master is highly debatable.

### Nharr

February 13, 2012

The title of this post is a word; a word that I use for Monday mornings.

Nharr.

It’s the state of mind of you when you sit on the toilet and try to work up the willpower to get up and put your socks on.

Nharr.

It’s the feeling of waiting for the bus and detachedly observing your balls wrinkling in the cold, cold morning air.

Nharr.

It’s the feeling, the feeling, when that wrinkling thought crawls across your mind, and you slowly wonder if the morning really is this cold, or if you forgot to put on some pants — and you don’t really care.

Nharr indeed.

That’s the feeling that those other people can’t be awake yet, it is not humanly possible, the world cannot be so cruel, they must be faking, they are the same somnambulant zombies as you, or p-zombies otherwise, and please don’t let them say anything to convince you otherwise.

Nharr.

It’s sympathy for Cthulhu, and the feeling that if you have to actually do something, all the doom-redolent ponderous dreams of Lovecraft will break loose. Morose. And terrible. And rugose. And detached, and stuff. Because you’re fucking dead, not awake.

Nharr.

It’s the vivid, dream-like flash of a world where your work chair could transform, Optimus Prime-like, into a lounging bed with anti-advisor missiles.

It’s the sound you make, it’s the feeling of a Monday morning before the first cup of coffee.

Nharr.

*

In contrast, the word for the period after three, when the power of coffee has left you, left you empty and burnt up inside… that word is “eeh”.

Which both probably should be places in Zothique or the Dreamlands.

Oh, and the word for the third pit, the one in between? Uccastrog.