you can't comb a hairy ball

⁕ pure math undergrad ⁕ in love with anything algebraic ⁕

[bsdndprplplld]

welcome ✨

i'm a math student, currently persuing master's degree. this semester I'm taking courses on complex manifolds, category theory, equivariant cohomology and representation theory

my bachelor's thesis was about my partial result in the knot/link theory. right now I'm finishing that proof and hoping to publish it when (if?) I'm done. my interests include algebraic and geometric topology and the goal for this year is to get to know some algebraic geometry

I post updates of how I'm doing, photos of my ugly notes and sometimes share some study methods that proved to be useful to me

oh and math is my special interest, I take it way too seriously lol

–––

my posts with study tips:

tips for studying math

tips for studying math part 2: you have an exam but the course is boring

[bsdndprplplld]

just had a reflection about perfectionism. today I had an exam for which I was prepared very well, but my stupid brain happened and I didn't get the highest grade. my boyfriend was comforting me and he asked since when I want to ace everything, this question made me think

indeed, I don't want to ace everything. I am taking 4 courses this semester, one of which I don't care about enough to strive for the best grade, one of which is way too hard to aim that far, two of which I thought were achievable. and now I didn't achieve that. it feels different to set unrealistic goals and then never achieve them than to set very realistic ones and still fail, that's what I realized today

I am not a perfectionist. I used to be, years ago, and then I learned to set realistic goals. now I'm thinking, isn't perfectionism a kind of a coping mechanism? deep down you know your goals are impossible, so it's not really surprising when you fail. you are never satisfied, sure, but maybe it does feel more safe this way than to not know if you will be satisfied or disappointed. if that's the case then setting realistic goals is absolutely not the way to heal perfectionism

[szimmetria-airtemmizs]

Balance

[joytri]

We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like being banished into forests far from everyone. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Franz Kafka

[bsdndprplplld]

did that to me

[trivalentlinks]

the one for me:

[bsdndprplplld]

you really can't

wha?

please explain what this message means or else the curiosioty will kill me

[igotstuckinthevoidhelp]

look at your blog title

[bsdndprplplld]

haha of course, how silly of me

[bsdndprplplld]

you really can't

wha?

please explain what this message means or else the curiosioty will kill me

[bsdndprplplld]

I neglected this blog like hell, sorry

I had a lot of work to do, that's kinda what happened. but I would like to go back to posting regularly, so maybe I could write about something people would want to see?

for now my ideas for posts include

more study tips

a quick intro to moduli functors, since a lot of sources are written in a way that requires advanced algebraic geometry. I could explain the basics using (almost) only commutative algebra

updates on my life and what I've been working on

books recommendations

interesting math problems I encountered recently

if you'd like to see any of that, let me know! and feel free to give me more suggestions in the comments

[joytri]

We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like being banished into forests far from everyone. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Franz Kafka

[bsdndprplplld]

did that to me

[spacelazarwolf]

also maybe it’s just bc i have a very autistic interest in sociology and human behavior but i like to understand why people think and behave the way they do. it’s been an asset to my ability to advocate for myself and for others. if i know why someone believes something rather than just what they believe, i can have an actual conversation with them. so it always boggles my mind when ppl insist it doesn’t matter why someone believes something, they’re Just Wrong And Should Change Their Mind. like yeah if i could snap my fingers and make someone not transphobic i’d do that but i live on planet earth so the only thing that is gonna potentially get someone to change their mind as long as they’re not too far gone is having an honest conversation with them. i have changed several minds this way, including my own parents, so it’s frustrating to see ppl discouraging this.

[jewish-kulindadromeus]

literally the first thing my socialist parents taught me was "To help people, you have to know how they think"

you can't just scream at people to stop being bigots. it doesn't work.

Understanding how people get to certain positions or mindframes is step one in communication and discussion. No one thinks they're evil - no one really wants to be evil. So somehow, they've justified their thought process to themself.

It is much more productive to figure out how they got there and why they think what they think than it is to just assume they are that way because they suck. Just. Saying.

[bsdndprplplld]

yes! the same goes for teaching btw. people who just recite the textbook to you are not good teachers. the key to a good explanation of a concept is understanding why someone does not understand it in the first place. and doing that to your own mind when trying to learn something is the point of good learning

[knotty-et-al]

Visualization of the Rubik's cube

[art-of-mathematics]

Inspired by this:

[sisterofiris]

Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

[yay855]

I mean, if someone wrote that to me, I’d probably believe they were sick.

[rox-and-prose]

“Slutantions” has me crying laughing

[watermite]

i once emailed my professor with a migraine. a mistake.

“I amsick will not to choir because i have a heache. i Hope its very and i am so sorry

love,

blue”

the subject line was “OW”

[xakumi]

THE SUBJECT LINE IS THE BEST PART JSJFJSJDJS JUST IMAGINE GETTING AN EMAIL WITH NO CONTEXT OTHER THAN “OW”

[themodernsouthernpolytheist]

As someone who has taught college, please send those emails because 1) We WILL believe that; no one would write that on purpose and 2) we need a laugh sometimes.

[asortoflight]

On the other side of this, once after getting taken to the ER by ambulance, I got an email from the professor whose class I’d passed out in, and the message had no text, just the subject line “you good?”

[whisky-gerblin]

Reblogging for the last addition

[badgraph1csghost]

Claritin makes me weird, but I have allergies so there’s about a month and a half block of time where I’m taking Claritin and am just weird most of the time.

Anyway, my last year of college, I got the flu or something in late March and was also taking Mucinex. I told my professor I couldn’t come to class one day by email except I couldnt think of what to say, so my medicated ass decided to make a Fry meme. I think it said something like “Not sure if I can go to class with a head the size of Texas, bottom text.” I didn’t think until the next day that it probably wasn’t socially-acceptable to tell your philosophy professor you weren’t coming to class via Tumblr style memes. When i got back to class, i found that she’d printed it out and taped it to the classroom bulletin board.

[badgraph1csghost]

Oh shit you guys i turned on my WinXP laptop that I used to use back then.

IT WAS ON THE DESKTOP. THIS IS WHAT I SENT.

It’s even worse than i remember it

[omnicat]

I laugh myself hoarse every time this post comes around, so here it is again.

[bucketbunny]

Once emailed a professor from my hospital bed high on painkillers after a really bad car crash which my heart actually stopped the email “Dead cant class sory”

[fearthefuzzybear]

ok uh. how do you hypothetically say "i want to study you" in a friendly way

so far the best I've got is "can i join a discord derver that youre in so i can observe you in your natural habitat"

[fearthefuzzybear]

hm. i see your point

[threefuckencrowsinaleatherjacket]

Hi ppl who are nosy and want to know ur grades so they can judge how smart u are are annoying as fuck

[bsdndprplplld]

god I hate when people do that. bonus points for "so the exam was super easy. what did you get?"

[transgenderer]

Measure theory and topology both have this great flavor where you give the most minimal possible definition for the thing you want and then you get all the nice properties, except no, your definition is soft enough to allow crazy nonsense counterexamples hiding behind everything that you have to carefully sidestep around. It's like doing math in a jungle

[bsdndprplplld]

doing (basic) algebraic topology in this context feels like going to that jungle and saying you know what bring this thing down we are building a city here. everything is a CW complex, everything is euclidean, and compact or paracompact if it must, all of this so that we can forget about sidestepping around topology and do algebra in peace lmao

[bsdndprplplld]

oh i just saw, congrats on the bachelors!! im still in calc 3, i thought itd be less mundane but it is actually killing now to the point where i cant even open our stewart text. all my friends in decent math programs are doing more fun and general versions this course. i just cant wait to not use this awful book anymore (all our work is based on the books problems and methodology). all this is to say your progress is inspiring. hopefully i get to a point where i can also be having fun around structures and such, i just have to finish grinding through the filter of "do a bunch of this and don't worry about what it really means, btw good luck problem solving on your exams with 0 neither provided intuition nor rigor". i hope blogs like this stick around!

thank you for the nice message!

I'm so sorry to hear that this is how they teach you math, something like this takes away all pleasure and satisfaction. I didn't have calc 3 as such at my university, we would generally focus on theory and understanding from the start. however, we did have some courses where the mindset was like you just described and it was torture. I hope it changes for you soon so that you can finally enjoy some beautiful math!

[positivelyapunovexponent-good]

One of the really amusing things about college is that if you pay attention you sometimes can discern some of your professor's favorite pet concepts.

For instance, in my Topology course this semester, the Zariski topology has come up at least once in every single homework set so far, and in multiple lectures.

And okay, that's not that weird. The Zariski topology is a really important object in a LOT of fields, especially algebraic geometry. And discussing it at length is a really pedagogically sound move because the Zariski topology is a good example of a topology with a very well motivated structure (the closed sets are the algebraic sets!) that still very naturally gives rise to a lot of strange features, like the way all open sets in the standard topology are Zariski-dense. It was quite effective at startling me out of the complacency of unconsciously basing my intuition of how topologies behave entirely on the standard topology on the reals. So my professor bringing up Zariski so often doesn't necessarily mean he has any special affection for it.

except...

My professor writes many of the homework problems himself. Not all of them - the less interesting ones he lifts from the textbook- but some. Well, every single Zariski topology question I've encountered so far is an original from this guy. I know because the all the questions he writes personally have paragraphs of commentary contextualizing why he thinks the problem is interesting and where the ideas in the problem are going later in the course. And well- let's just say the asides on the Zariski topology have been copious indeed

AND THEN there's the way he talks about the Zariski topology in class! It's with this blend of enthusiasm and fascination only comparable to the way I've seen tumblrites talk about their blorbos. Like hey! Come behold this sgrungy little guy! Isn't he fucked up? Isn't he marvelous? And I look and I can only conclude YEAH that is indeed a spectacular specimen, he's so strange, I want to put him in a terrarium and study him (and then I get to! In my homeworks!)

Anyways. It makes me really happy picking up on how excited my professor is to share this topology with us. I'm kind of baffled that people assume math is a boring field full of boring people when there exist folks like my professor who get this passionate about a topology!

[bsdndprplplld]

oh and there is the dual thing: sometimes you just know that the professor hates the subject. like when I was taking one of the analysis courses, where the lecture was with one professor and the tutorials were with a different one

at the lectures we were two months into measure theory while at the tutorials haven't even started doing exercises on that topic, but oh it was fine, still plenty of time, he knows what he's doing – we thought, like fools. then the midterm was announced, two weeks left, we still haven't started measure theory. then it was one week left, so the professor tried to solve some lebesgue integrals with us, but he got so bored with each example that he hasn't finished a single one. at this point we just hoped that maybe measure theory just won't be on the midterm, it was too late to do anything. well, unfortunately, the midterm consisted mostly of measure theory problems, it made sense because that was the main content of the course

the professor was clearly very passionate about hating measure theory

[bsdndprplplld]

maybe a littel late for Real’s Math Ask Meme 18, 6 and 3, please?

hi, thanks for the questions!

3: what math classes did you like the most?

tough choice! for the content itself I'd say abstract algebra, commutative algebra, analytic functions and algebraic topology. for the way the class was taught, a course on galois theory I took last semester was probably the best. the pace of the lecture allowed me to learn everything on the spot, not too fast, but not so slow that my mind would wander. the tutorials were also great, because the teacher found the perfect balance between explaining and showing the solutions, and engaging us to think about what should happen next. the courses I mentioned above were also taught well, but the galois theory one was absolutely perfect

6: why do you learn math?

I enjoy the feeling of math in my brain. I can spend hours thinking about a problem and not get bored, which doesn't usually happen with other things. when I finish a study session I feel tired in a good way, like I spent my time and energy doing something valuable and it's very satisfying

18: can you share a good math problem you've solved recently?

given a holomorphic line bundle L over a compact complex manifold, prove that L is trivial iff L and the dual of L both admit a non-zero section

this problem is quite basic, in a sense that you work on it right after getting started with line bundles, but I believe it to be a good problem, because it forces you to analyze the difference between trivial holomorphic bundles and trivial smooth bundles, so it's great for building some intuition