Hello Floor

Thanks for breaking my fall..

I think I hit rock bottom.

(Image Provided by *mumblyjoe)

I wish there was a book that came with instructions on how to live your life and how to meet people that were good for you. These things have never been my strong suit but I was always good at math so I made sure to do the most I could with it to downplay what I'm missing. I'm missing a lot because I can't seem to find anything to make me happy anymore.

Soul Matrix: Ursino Park

I usually have most of Wednesdays off except for a lovely class on Linear Algebra at 8:30 am.

We discuss matrices and our professor likes to tell us that a matrix can capture the soul of a system of equations. With certain properties and operations we can learn more about the solution. This is about how poetic mathematicians get.

I have decided to try and capture the soul of something through matrices ever so often. This week is Ursino Park. Its a tiny almost unnoticeable park close to where I'm living at the moment.

4X2
-QED

Math Book Recipe

Some math books are set up as a cook book really. You have your ingrediants and you follow your steps and you are left with the end result.
Take my modeling class for instance.

How to Approximate a Non-Dimensionalized Ordinary Differential Equation
Ingrediants:
10-13 Pieces of Lined Paper
1 Scrap Notebook
1 Mechanical Pencil
1 Great Eraser
5-6 Wikipedia Pages
10-20 Different Properties and Trig Identities

Step 1: Brace yourself
Step 2: Get your scrap notebook, pencil, and eraser ready
Step 3: Look up all variables and units of variables. Wikipedia Baby! CHECK YOUR UNITS!
Step 4: Create non-dimensional parameters from the variables. Think carefully!
Step 5: Plug it into your ODE and initial conditions. Alright looking good!
Step 6: Approximate solution as a power series and throw that sucker in there. Does that look much better? I didn't think so.
Step 7: Time to solve instead of 1 now 3 different ordinary differential equations and also one is not homogeneous so its time to get out those trig identities. Fun.
Step 8: Write it all over again on that pretty lined paper! Be Neat!

End product: Several hours of your life wasted away as well as the several trees you just killed with the amount of paper used. But a job well done! Congrats. You get a cupcake! -Now interpret you solution. no joke. I'm serious.

(Image Provided by Anne-Marie)

Oh the Joys of HW!
-QED

Professors are Human too...

Today I was in the computer lab "working diligently" on Applied Mathematical Modeling when two professors came in. One was very forcefully explaining to an advisor why a certain student should not be permitted to take his course...again! All of a sudden the professor was cursing and evidently very upset about the situation. :O

It was quite amusing but personally, I have never seen a professor so angry before. I've seen them act sillier than most children but never angry. And I thought they were supposed to love us unconditionally :(

Please do not get your professors upset. They start to do things like this!

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(Image Provided by Tarelkin)

-QED

Blog Love

I love blogs. I love everything about blogs. I love the pictures in blogs, the stories, the great ideas! Here are a few that I enjoy reading.

http://taza-and-husband.blogspot.com/

http://playing-grown-up.blogspot.com/

http://courtneyskaleidoscope.blogspot.com/

(photo taken by me)

Its my guilty pleasure :D

-QED

When I knew math was the one...

I knew math was meant for me when I started drawing number cartoons in elementary school. Each number had a color and usually a silly story that only a little girl could come up with.

(drawn by me)

Now about 15 years later, its surprising how much of my life has to do with mathematics. I just graduated with a Bachelor's in Mathematics with minors in Computer Science and Art History and now I am a first year graduate student in Applied Mathematics, Phd Track. So far things have been interesting. Everything in one way or another relates to math. Not to say that this is going to be solely based on the subject that most despise. But that I hope this serves more of footprints left behind from a long journey. We'll see how it goes
-QED

09/09/09

Special things usually happen on the cubed days like take 8^3 (08/08/08): That was the day I left my research summer program at Colorado. And for those who do not know, CO changed everything.

And 7^3 (07/07/07): I was in Forever21 with my baby sister, Claudia, when I found a pink dress that was the last one perfect size. I wore it the Harry Potter Book 7 Release. Another good day.

Today nothing happened until now..

(image provided by Gosia)

Special things don't always happen unexpectedly. Sometimes you need to make special things happen.
-QED