Trading, Maths and Sleep

Taking a Break

• I’m currently taking a mini-break after having gotten back from having pizza with friends in the Pure Maths department. I have some work to get done tonight and tomorrow, and I took a nap in the mid-afternoon to be able to work through the late evening. So we’ll see how that goes.
• This has been a week of missed opportunities, because I just didn’t have the time for things. I know I have yet to get back to a handful of people, and I will be doing that this week. Unfortunately, I was only able to do so much this week, but it was one of the most rewarding weeks I’ve had in a while.

Grad (Pure) Maths students Pizza

• This is the “Fun Guy (or Gal)

• Firecracker shrimp

• A locally brewed beer

This week

• We decided on a study group for Algebra IV, so that’s added to my schedule.
• In Abstract Algebra we covered proofs for UFDs, Norms and Companion Matrices, and did some Category Theory: Adjoinct Functors, Free Products, Categories , Morphisms.
• Elliptic Curves: we covered Isogenies. I still have homework to do for that class, but will probably get to that next weekend, unfortunately, as I have something else with a more pressing deadline to get done by this weekend.
• Random Probabilistic Graphs: we covered Sparse and Dense Graphs and Thresholds for Random Graphs.
• I went to a recruitment event by Jane Street, in which a Trader went through several puzzle-type mathematical games with us, and for some of them we could win prizes. It was really fun! I learned about “locking” in Jeopardy, which is where if there are scores for 1000, 4000 and 15,000, and say these correspond to players A, B and C respectively, and you are player C, you know that the most player B can bid is 4000, for a total of 8000, so you can “lock” in a bid so that even if your guess is incorrect, you can still win, based on a measure of how likely your answer is correct. We’re also getting swag, which is nice of them, and they gave us food vouchers. I haven’t used mine yet.
• I saw a talk in the Combinatorics seminar by Colin on Rainbow Numbers of Linear Equations.
• I saw a talk at the Number Theory seminar involving Number fields via Malle’s Conjecture and Cohen-Lenstra-Martinet / behavior of class groups (virtually)
• I saw a talk by a faculty member on topological data analysis / persistent homology, which involved cohomology, sheaves and mapping data into barcode decompositions.
• I also saw a PhD Pure Maths student (Michael) give a talk on circle arrangements and finding the upper and lower bounds for the number of combinations. He related it to binary encoding, and showed that with tighter bounds we can deal with multiplicities of arrangements. I really liked that he used animation and knot theory to think about the problem, as well as the idea of a permutohedron.

Other

• I gave the talk at Brown, which went well, and had some board meetings to attend. I was able to stick to yoga during the week, thankfully.
• There was a Private AI workshop I really wanted to attend, but I just wasn’t able to get to, given my schedule.
• I also really had to spend more time on UFDs and the proofs this week; we sort of ran through PIDs and UFDs and are using different books and have exercises due to get feedback on, and these take time, so up to just before I went for pizza, I’ve been taking the time to understand the subtlety of each definiton and what it means in terms of Ring Theory. I will get there.
• Next week is the last week apparently legend Jim Sveda will be on air, so I would love to listen to his last session. I used to listen to him regularly on KUSC when I lived in LA, and he introduced me to Martinu.
• Speaking of music and internet, I seriously think my parents might be the only people in my country of birth to own a Sonos. They’ve kind of had to fight with technology that I’ve brought home and often been some of the first people to have these devices, which is interesting. So they’re probably some of the first people to have had Kindles, too, there. But they love reading, and it’s been so worth it for them. My parents love the Sonos device; they immediately took a liking to it and started thinking of all the possibilities of not having tethered setups throughout the house.

Next week

• My goal is to spend a bit more time on Algebra IV review with this study group, which is thankfully part of my schedule now, and to attempt the Elliptic Curves homework, as well as complete my Random Graphs homework. So basically my goals are based in taking the time to understand things fully, and to speak up more and ask questions.
• And rest. A friend of in a board meeting said that he had similar issues with sleep until he was firm about getting to bed at a certain time. I think it’s a good strategy rather than doing this thing during the week where I stay up really late and feel trashed throughout the first half of the day and never recover. But we’ll see. A girl can dream.

And that’s it