This Is A Video Of An Oksapmin Woman Demonstrating The Oksapmin Base-27 Counting System. The Oksapmin

june 10

happy monday :) feeling really productive today. planned the month of june for my blog (chiasamson.com, check it out if u want!!) and did a few drafts on my iPad. i literally can’t live without this iPad because there are days my laptop’s too inconvenient to carry so having this teeny tiny device really helps a lot in keeping me productive.

about to shoot later today but so far i’m happy with what i’ve accomplished!!! 💛

28.03.19 || coffee, a good book and beach sunsets. nothing even comes close to that.

Yesterday was hard.

I'm in some courses all this week, and I don't understand anything that 3 of the 4 speakers say. And I've just met the new PhD student of the department, and he's really smart and he's understanding most of the things. And on top of that my advisor is asking me to finish a big amount of writing. I feel really stupid and discouraged.

So, list of positive things to take into account this week:

- All of the courses are about PDEs and not Dynamical systems (which is my research topic). It's normal to not understand most of them.

- It is a great opportunity to see how people of other topics work, and what are they interests. You don't need to understand everything perfectly. Let go and enjoy.

- I learned a lot from yesterday's poster session, and from other students.

- Next year I would have a very smart PhD partner from who I could learn a lot.

- I am a slow-learner when understanding new topics, and that is okay. I could have other qualities that make me a good mathematician.

Littlewood polynomials are polynomials all of whose coefficients are either +1 or −1 (so even 0 is not allowed). If you take all Littlewood polynomials up to a certain degree, calculate all their (complex) roots, and plot those roots in the complex plane, then you get a beautiful fractal-like structure above.

The image is slightly misleading, because the “holes” on the unit circle tend to completely fill in if the degree goes up. Intuitively, the holes mean that complex numbers on the unit circle that are close to low-degree roots of unity are hard to approximate by low-degree Littlewood polynomials (unless they already are roots of unity).

In particular the structure at the edge of the ring is deeply interesting. Notice the familiarity with the dragon curve?

my everlasting hunger for obtaining knowledge will never subside. my mind will forever be a bundled mess of complex messages ending with a simple question mark.

Don’t know how people deal with rough days when they can’t be surrounded by all their favourite things. It’s the only thing that’s getting me through.

Hanna | exitum

I'm a physics major who works as a tutor with a bunch of math majors, and today I was explaining differentials to a student and I said to convert the dC/dt equation to one with differentials just multiply both sides by dt and that's the only difference and I could feel them all judging me hfgsgskdhdlhd trust me we know we are wrong but we are too lazy and dumb

Okay, okay, look, all is well.

Yeah mathematicians are gonna cringe a little when people say stuff like this because we know it’s not rigorous, but you know what else? We made that dy/dx notation look like fractions for a reason. Certainly what’s going on here is a little more subtle than division and multiplication and if you’re working with some really weird functions that subtlety could get you in trouble. But for most situations, you can treat that stuff like fractions, and we made the notation that way to highlight that fact and make the symbol manipulation more efficient.

We laid the complicated foundations with rigorous analysis so we would have a robust and efficient tool, and we made it user-friendly, and we gripe about its users using it the way we intended? That’s like complaining that I use my phone without understanding its circuitry or complaining that I eat pop tarts without understanding what’s in them. Those things are true, but my phone was designed to be used by someone who doesn’t understand or need to understand its circuitry and pop tarts were designed to be eaten by people who don’t understand or need to understand what’s in them. I know that someone understands my phone’s circuitry and someone knows what’s in pop tarts and I trust them.

You’re not lazy or dumb. Calculus, as mathematicians passed it off to engineers and scientists, was designed to be used by people who don’t understand or need to understand the rigorous analysis that holds it up. Engineers and scientists trust that we gave them a good tool that we built well, and they use it. It’s nice when they understand it more deeply and it serves them well but it’s not always necessary.

I’m not gonna stop joking about how silly treating dy/dx as a fraction is, because it certainly won’t fly in math circles where doing so might actually screw you over, but even more because that’s what everyone does. Every field cringes and giggles when the out-group uses their tools without deference and deep understanding, as is every field’s right, but it should never be taken too seriously, because guess what!

That’s the anthropocene, babey! That’s specialization of labor! We don’t all have time to understand everything, we just have to understand what we can and trust that someone else understands the rest! That’s science! That’s humanity! That’s beautiful! Joke about it all you want, it is a little weird, but anyone properly hating on it? Cut it out or I’ll cut you out and that’s that!

Be chaotic, and never know anything