ChapterZero

I welcome suggestions of similarly moving music. Down– Jason Walker and Molly Reed 9 Crimes — Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan Falling Slowly — from the movie Once Set Fire to the Third Bar — Snow Patrol and Martha Wainwright Pills – The Perishers & Sarah Isaksson Relator — Scarlett Johansson and Pete Yorn Summerwine [...]

I had a thought very much like this today at lunch, as I looked around and noticed how young all the students seem. Well, at least the thought in the first paragraph… except I’m in that nonexistent transitional period right now: somewhere on the curve interpolating Undergraduate with Professor. Slowly, ever so slowly, moving. Why [...]

For the past couple weeks, my WordPress installation hasn’t been able to automatically update itself via ftp. I got messages like “Error: There was an error connecting to the server, Please verify the settings are correct.” I didn’t find any useful entries in the wordpress.org forums. It turns out the problem was with the ProFTP [...]

Occasionally I’ll find myself looking for some way to pass a note to myself. Say I’ll come across a reference to a paper while using the internet from home, and want to store the link until I can access the paper through the school’s online subscriptions. When it was free, I used backpackit.com, although it [...]

It looks like Joel and I (mostly Joel, of course) may have come up with a way to bound the interior eigenvalues of a broad class of random matrices, something that apparently has not been done in such generality or usefulness—viz, the bound is non-asymptotic—before. It looks like they concentrate normally. Super exciting, if it [...]

I bought two clamshells of strawberries last week, and never got around to consuming them. Today I started to make lemonade and realized this was the perfect chance to put them to use, and try my hand at something new. Boy did this turn out good! Here’s my recipe for strawberry lemonade: You’ll need four [...]

I haven’t been invited to any soirees, so it looks like the highlight of this weekend will be putting a dining set together. I picked it up on Wednesday, and figured I’d put it together that night, but it turned out to be more of a chore than I’d expected. I’ll also be starting The [...]

I heard back from JFOCM today on the paper we submitted on matrix sparsification in various norms. The gist of the response was that we need to provide explicit examples of applications to show the value of the bounds we derived, because apparently these bounds are pretty easily derived from known results. For more detail, [...]

We’ve probably all heard this quote, or a paraphrasing of it, at one point or another: [Mathematics] possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without any appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable [...]