I’m timing this entry– I have to run tonight, then go to sleep in time to wake up at 5 am. So, what’s new in my life, you ask?

• I’m now proctoring a class in the electrical engineering department (numerical methods for engineers), which is causing me to reflect on the utter absurdity of the university system: that once you pass a class with a certain grade, you are assumed to know the material from it. Of course, I am *not* saying that I’m not fit for the job– just that my grades are proof of the fact.
• I am taking several wonderful math classes: Advanced Multivariate Calculus, Graph Theory with Applications, and Modern Algebra. The Algebra class is not really ground-breaking for me, as I’ve encountered most of the materical before, but it provides a refreshing chance for me to verify the absolute mathematical meaning of any statements I make (as relates to the material in that class) by requiring us to construct everything from the level of axioms. The Graph Theory class is highly disorganized, and I have yet to make any nontrivial proofs or observations, despite spending much effort on it. But both the material itself, and the prof’s way of presenting it are involving; I especially like the way we have long digressions into algorithms and programmatics aspects of problems. I have no idea what the MVC class will be like when we get to the meat of it, because we are still reviewing matrices. I did, however, learn about the connection between orthonormal bases and orthogonal matrices, which I actually found a use for in my Electromagnetics Class: translating between coordinate systems
• My *real* engineering classes have started: Electromagnetics and Circuits. Wonderful! Much math and schematics.
• I’m on book 6 of the Wheel of Time, still looking for book 7 to ensure I can continue reading without breaks. It is at times wonderful and at others boring and longwinded. I’ve also bought around 4 advanced math books that I will probably never read; that’s ok, however, as they are Dover books (and hence cheap :).
• My Numerical Methods prof from last semester is trying to get me to apply for a summer internship program in Applied Optics. I am going to also: there is one at the University of Rochester that involves applying ‘image flow’ techniques to examine pictures of possible interactions between black holes and stars. The travel is free (to UC Santa Cruz, internship site, and then back home)!

Possibly relevant posts:

• Too much… (3/25/2003)
• Note taking (6/16/2005)
• My mountain of work (8/5/2005)

I just thought of a cool MT plugin idea: a plugin that generates a graph of blogging activity. Simple, yet useful. It could be used to determine the average lifetime of (MT) blogs; I suspect it would also motivate lazy people like myself to blog more often. Really, I am suprised I’ve heard nothing about such a plugin.. I’m almost tempted to attempt writing it myself. And perhaps I will.

But first, I had yet another brilliant idea. A database of proofs– the perfect site for any math freak like myself– community generated and editorialized. Because sometimes you would rather find a proof written up on the web than have to fuss around with chat rooms or rely on the untimely altruism of newsgroupers. I figure I could run a latex-html translation backend so equations and what not could be translated to gifs and embedded in the pages; also, some subset of latex text formatting (e.g.: bold, emphasis) could be supported. And if the site took off, we could have special interest bulletin boards, and an area to allow people to request certain proofs be added to the database, and even specialized ‘tutorials’ that give condensed tutorials in a mathematical field by stringing together a series of proofs from the database along with remarks. I do mean database, as everything should be indexed under several fields (e.g.: complexity (a good metric would be undergrad w/ year in curriculumn, grad, or postgrad), cool factor (subjective of course, but possibly useful), technique (contradiction, exhaustion, etc.), mathematical classification (I would have to look it up, but I know there is a system), year originally published (if applicable), poster, date posted). Duh! I forgot to mention, not only would this database support proofs, it would also support definitions. And everything in the database would have to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

I have a dream!

Possibly relevant posts:

• LaTeX blogs– sounds sexy! (8/3/2001)
• Meta Category setup (1/23/2005)
• NRC Rankings (12/25/2004)