Here’s a snapshot of what running OTIS looks like these days.
Starts from last Sunday afternoon until Monday lunch.
Timestamps indicate when the action was completed (rather than started).
Sunday 13:04: Process a late financial aid request from someone who forgot
to request it earlier.
Sunday 13:14: Edit OTIS website
to clarify that if you haven’t had your registration approved within 48 hours,
then you should email Evan to ask.
Sunday 13:15: Process a student who wants to drop the fall semester and
come back to re-join in the spring.
Sunday 13:55: Answer a question from a student on Discord on applying
AM-GM on the inequality that I was trying to do in my head when I failed my
driving test 11 years ago.
Sunday 14:04: Fix a reported typo in the problem statement of
China TST 2015/2/3
in the OTIS …
Early in 2023 the MIT Undergraduate Math Association had an event where course
18’s could get paired with a graduate student and chat over coffee.
So naturally I got asked what I wish I knew as an undergraduate.
This post records some subset of the things I said.
Undergraduate math isn’t deep after all — it’s broad but shallow.
(Graduate school is a different story.)
For years, I was told that when I got to university,
math would be way harder than in high school,
because blah-blah-blah contests aren’t real math blah-blah-blah.
Turns out I was somewhat misled.
I wish I had taken fewer math classes.
For someone that’s taken circa 30 semesters of math classes,
I remember astonishingly little of what was covered.
All too often I’ve had the rather depressing experience of not
understanding chapters of Napkin, despite being the author.
For me the biggest difference between undergraduate math and PhD life
has been something I’ve never seen anyone else talk about:
it’s the feeling like I could no longer see the ground.
To explain what this means, imagine that mathematics is this wide tower,
where you start with certain axioms as a foundation,
and then you build upwards on it.
At first learning math felt like slowly climbing up this tower.
When I reached a landmark, it felt like I was on the balcony
of the 30th or 50th or 100th floor, enjoying the view,
with an appreciation of the floors I had ascended to get here.
In theory, proofs in math can be formalized as a
long sequence of logical steps from the axioms that could be
computer-verified.
This turns out to way too cumbersome to actually do in practice given
the current state of technology (though …
Last weekend in StarCraft, the world championship at IEM Katowice 2023
saw a so-good-it-must-be-scripted Cinderella story,
where Oliveira won the world championship in a totally unexpected way.
It was a whole roller-coaster of upset after upset from Oliveira,
and up until the grand finals we were all still asking,
“this can’t be, is this really happening?”.
Some context: StarCraft has one of the lowest upset rates
of any competitive game out there, and Oliveira (formerly known as TIME)
was ranked something like #21 coming in.
Last November at DreamHack Atlanta (which I was at!),
he didn’t win a single map. And just a month before IEM 2023,
Blizzard had shut down its Chinese servers.
But he’d been practicing 12 to 15 hours a day lately, and it showed.
The final winner interview
was so emotional not only did Oliveira start crying,
the host also started crying …
A while ago someone asked me how COVID had affected the students I worked with.
I replied that, on average, the pandemic had tripled my students’ productivity.
And I’m gonna brag about it like the proud teacher I am.
So you have a fair coin that you found on the ground,
or at least that’s what everyone says.
But on each of N times that you’ve tossed it around,
you see every flip has been heads.
For which value of N should you start to suspect
that the coin isn’t actually fair?
For which values of N can you firmly declare
that the tails side is not even there?
This is a pitch for a new text that I’m thinking of writing.
I want to post it here to solicit opinions from the general community before
investing a lot of time into the actual writing.
Summary
There are a lot of students who ask me a question isomorphic to:
How do I learn to write proofs?
I’ve got this on my Q&A. For the contest kiddos out there,
it basically amounts to saying “read the official solutions to any competition”.
But I think I can do better.
Requirements
Calling into question the obvious, by insisting that it be “rigorously proved”, is to say to a student,
“Your feelings and ideas are suspect. You need to think and speak our way.”
Now there is a place for formal proof in mathematics, no question.
But that place is not a student’s first introduction to mathematical argument.
At …
I might be going too far with this Arch Linux brand loyalty, but I am so psyched I don’t care.
💸
There’s three pieces of hardware that I’ve always kind of wanted but never been
willing to spend money on in isolation:
A handheld gaming console
A laptop with a touch screen
A laptop with enough power to play games on a Steam library (my laptop is a bit too old for this)
So when I heard the Steam Deck existed and it would be running an Arch Linux system beneath it,
I totally caved.
I’m just sad I didn’t hear about in time to be early enough in the queue to get it by Christmas. Ah well.
In unrelated news, careful readers might notice that the blog has been moved to blog.evanchen.cc.
I think the old URL usamo.wordpress.com will continue to …
When I finally open my eyes and look at the clock, it is 8am.
It doesn’t feel like it’s only been eight hours, though.
I’ve just had a long and complicated dream that I can’t remember much of anymore,
except that I think I was running a lot, and trying to not die, so I somehow feel sore.
That NyQuil stuff really works, I think to myself, and crawl out of bed.
(Even though it’s like trying to drink mouthwash.) I haven’t slept that soundly all week.
Or maybe I’m finally slowly recovering from my cold, and that’s why that night was better?
All I know is that I’m glad I didn’t spend another night coughing my lungs out
and struggling to get some shut-eye.
I drag my sorry butt out of bed and head over to my nearby computer …
A man that a woman that a child that a bird that I heard saw knows loves
This is a well-formed English phrase. And yet parsing it is difficult, because you need a stack of size four.
Four is a pretty big number.
And that’s after I’ve written the sentence down for you,
so your eyes could scan it two or three times to try and parse it.
Imagine if I instead said this sentence aloud.
Other examples include any object with some moderately complex structure:
Let ABC be a triangle and let AD, BE, CF be altitudes concurrent at the orthocenter H.
This is not a very complicated diagram,
but it’s also very difficult to capture in your …
