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6:00 PM
you haven't asked about $0.999...$ (yet)
 
I heard it's equal to 1.
 
It's actually 1 minus 0.000...01.
;)
 
@anakhro Thanks for visiting my blog. Why do they indicate that I am a crank?
*does it
 
there's a meaningful line between those who deny established truths, who are cranks of the first order, and those who advocate for alternate if improbable-to-be-adopted views of the reality that we all share without denying anything. i nominate you to be a crank, second class.
i may also be in this category. i keep most of my views to myself
 
wouldn't you need more than a line?
 
6:04 PM
i usually do two or three lines before the crankery comes out
 
hahaha
is the general consensus that algebraic topology should be taught via picture? i.e. its enough to just get a feel for the fact that CW complexes are locally contractible, without looking in the appendix of hatcher, or is it fruitful for a student who gets anxious about such minutae to read the appendix of hatcher?
 
@leslietownes What is improbable about the idea that our ways of pronouncing hexadecimal are suboptimal when counting and doing arithmetic out loud, and that I have seen a way forward?
 
crankery is just applied category theory
 
for instance, I can anticipate an argument that involves a picture that could work if all steps were legal , but im always hesitant to actually attempt these without knowing they are legal, does the appendix of hatcher clear all this stuff up?
 
i have no reason to doubt that our ways of pronouncing hex are suboptimal. i do feel that maybe the need for pronouncing hex in the first place may be less of a thing than you regard it to be. it's subjective. i don't claim to be right about this.
 
6:07 PM
or more generally, what resources could
 
@porridgemathematics "Should be" is a strong claim. Hatcher's book expects that a student can go from picture to proof and back (the famous example of this is the proof that pi_1 is a group: he draws a picture of the necessary reparameterizations and leaves it to the student to write down a formula and show it is continuous. You can do this from the picture! But the picture does not write down the words in that proof, you have to recognize how to extract it.
 
i hated hatcher. i took two classes out of that book. too much is in pictures, i can't do pictures. i don't think anything is missing from his treatment, it's just not written for somebody like me.
 
I do think there's such a thing as focusing too much on certain details (some people will spend hours upon hours focusing on a point-set detail that obscures the idea in an argument) but I don't think one should just ignore a detail without at least knowing the strategy in which one writes down a proof.
The fact that CW complexes are locally contractible is not obvious from, nor encoded in, any picture.
 
the course I'm taking uses this fact a lot and makes no attempt to prove it
the reason being likely that the point set topology detracts from the flow of the arguments of the course
 
Yes, that's the real answer. You're a gifted student and can check that detail.
I mean, read a proof of it.
 
6:11 PM
I am also not saying people that people should stop pronouncing hexadecimal numbers like telephone numbers when that is appropriate, for example in IT, where the hex numbers are data and not quantities. I'm just saying that if you are doing arithmetic or counting or measuring in hexadecimal, my system for pronouncing hex is the easiest to learn, and probably the best in existence, although probably not the best possible.
 
it's not difficult, just annoying
like all technical facts about CW complexes
 
thats another thing, I always feel like a bit of an imposter when I read proofs of things that give me anxiety, its like I should be able to do this myself if I've been studying this subject for x number of years
 
i think it's good to be able to get used to using given things as a black box. i don't enjoy it when books seem like they're forcing me to do that because i can't see the picture. i literally can't see the picture. i had a blind student once. i had more in common with him than my sighted students.
 
The proof is very short.
 
*read proofs of things that if I assumed without proof would give me anxiety
yeah, thats true
i think i'll give the CW complex appendix section a read
it seems worth it
its annoying that I have to weigh the time of reading supplementary material with time I could spend revising for exams, there has to be a better system
 
6:14 PM
The idea is to induct and use the fact that discs are locally contractible. The reason that is a natural idea is that CW complexes are an inductive idea: you make something iteratively out of discs.,
One always has to weigh time
There is no way to get out of weighing time because one day we will die.
 
CW complexes, triangulations, and the like are just mortal creatures trying to embrace the infinitude of what's out there. it's not going to be easy.
 
I agree that exams are a suboptimal way to organize the education system but I can only wish good luck on changing that...
 
You still haven't explained "
given your Medium articles, you still are [a crank]."
 
The important thing is the feedback. The evaluation is primarily used as a sorting function, which I am not interested in.
 
6:16 PM
beware though, I think there's a slight error in the order of things in the Hatcher appendix
 
@anakhro Hello?
 
There are other textbooks which take more care with the point-set pre-requisites as they go, but be warned that some authors have a contract with the devil and thus write the most soul-sucking books to fill their quota.
 
yeah, I definitely appreciate the fact that hatcher has tried to not make his book soul sucking,its night and day compared to rudin in my opinion
@Thorgott oh? so whats the correct one?
 
I keep reading 'hatcher' as 'Thatcher', lol.
 
let's not have a go at rudin. the first seven chapters of one of his books were great. then everybody took the greatness of those and was like 'why don't we teach measure theory from rudin. why don't we teach complex analysis from rudin.'" because his books are a disaster is why.
 
6:20 PM
"I hate hatcher' was what started it.
 
but that's not his fault. it's the fault of his adherents.
 
I forgot exactly where
 
@leslietownes thats true, the best way to go is 1-7 of rudin and then spivak calculus on manifolds for the parts where he introduces forms
 
he implicitly uses that CW complexes are Hausdorff one page before proving it, but it does not lead to circularity
 
and folland/royden for meausre theory
 
6:21 PM
i like bartle's integration. folland and royden are also great.
 
I don't like a single chapter of a single one of his books. You could never come up with the proof unless you already knew it.
 
@Thorgott thanks, ill take note when I read it
 
That's not true. The functional analysis book is pretty good for an advanced student.
 
royden is a really physically poorly put together book. the glue rotted on mine and the pages fell out. and the library copy had the same issue.
 
also Hatcher doesn't explicitly mention that the CW topology on a subcomplex agrees with its subspace topology, confirm this as a sanity check at some point
 
6:22 PM
@Thorgott will do
 
Textbook discussion gets dreadfully boring right quick though so lunch break is over for me, I think.
 
ahh, this is all pretty valuable information, it will save me a lot of agony
 
I don't like PoMA, but I've already talked about that often enough in here
 
I've got to go do something. Thanks for the conversation.
 
I agree with the proof opacity comment, its pretty much irreproducable unless you've read it before
(or are rudin)
 
6:25 PM
$$\require{AMScd}\begin{CD}
A @>>> B\\
@VVV @VVV\\
C @>>> D\end{CD}$$
ok, test successful, I can do diagrams
 
So I missed the opportunity to slam my “favorite” textbook author. Rats.
 
the opportunity is always there. shoot from the hip
it's what i do
 
Love a good author slam
 
well, the exercises are good for strong students, so there is some redeeming value.
 
the problem with a lot of books is that there's no middle ground between walter rudin announcing tricks with no explanation, and michael spivak trying to be my friend and amuse me and also live in my guest bedroom. there has to be a happy medium.
 
6:28 PM
i kind of want to say that medium is folland
but his scope is not as vast
 
folland is a really good book. both the analysis book and his PDE.
i don't feel lesser than or imposed upon.
 
I strongly disagree on Spivak. But his 5 volume text is too verbose, and Calculus on Manifolds far the opposite.
i believe in humor in math books.
 
I love Folland, but it isn't really an introductory text
 
while I have the opportunity, may I know what people think of 'from calculus to cohomology'?
that's true
 
I mean, it's technically a stand-alone text, but it's not pedagogically designed as an introduction
 
6:30 PM
One reviewer of my first book bitched that humor doesn't belong in math texts. Fu*k him.
 
folland is very much, if you've learned aspects of analysis once, here's some more. not introductory. totally agree on that.
humor does belong in math texts, i think spivak at times just writes too much. it's not that he can't be funny, it's just, lower the volume a little bit.
 
@porridge I don't know it.
 
i liked bott and tu for differential forms. i have not seen that other book
 
is bott and tu good for an introduction?
 
If you’re talking about the 5-volume text, I agree it's too wordy. To much time winding and unwinding notations. In his defense, he wrote it as he was learning.
Introduction to what ?
 
6:33 PM
cohomology
 
With what background?
 
bott and tu is a beautiful book, I should read more of it
I've heard good things about from calculus to cohomology, but I haven't been able to check it out yet
 
algebraic topology from the first two chapters of hatcher, some basic knowledge of manifolds, some basic knowledge of riemann surfaces from a course taught at imperial college
 
It is meant as a second course. You should know some algebraic topology and know differential forms and manifolds.
 
do you know differential forms already?
 
6:35 PM
that's where I'm completely lacking, more or less
 
It gets into sheaf cohomology ideas and spectral sequences quite fast.
 
then I recommend reading Tu's An Introduction to Manifolds first
 
That said, it's the only place to learn why product in cohomology corresponds to transverse intersection of submanifolds.
 
it's a light read and you likely already know some of the stuff in there, so it won't be difficult, but it contains a thorough exposition on the basics of differential forms and de Rham cohomology (which, techncially, is covered in Bott&Tu as well, but their recap there is too brisk if you don't already know the material)
 
Learn to compute with differential forms, not just abstract tensor definitions.
 
6:40 PM
okay great, that sounds like what I need
 
7:07 PM
@Thorgott Suppose i: A -> X is a closed inclusion which is locally a cofibration (for all x in i(A) there is a neighborhood U so that the restriction i: A cap U -> U is a cofibration), is it globally so?
X is compact if it helps.
 
7:30 PM
after googling what a cofibration is and thinking for a couple minutes, I've reached the conclusion that I have no clue
sounds kinda wrong, but dunno
 
 
1 hour later…
8:54 PM
All (co)homology is with $\mathbb{Q}$ coefficients. All manifolds are compact, oriented, with boundary.
Let $M$ be a $4n$-dimensional manifold, then we have a symmetric bilinear pairing $H^{2n}(M,\partial M)\times H^{2n}(M,\partial M)\rightarrow\mathbb{Q},(\varphi,\psi)\mapsto\langle\varphi\cup\psi,\mu\rangle$ ($\mu$ the fundamental class). Currying makes this into a linear map $H^{2n}(M,\partial M)\rightarrow H^{2n}(M,\partial M)^{\ast}$, which fits into a triangle with the restriction map $H^{2n}(M,\partial M)\rightarrow H^{2n}(M)$ and the isomorphism $H^{2n}(M)\rightarrow H^{2n}(M,\parti
 
 
2 hours later…
10:30 PM
How fitting, the day after I finish my review and need to adjust my study plans I read a discussion on math texts..........@TedShifrin I had a question about textbook progression...
 
A discussion on math texts? Oh, you mean Rudin with no picture in sight anywhere?
 
Lol...........Yea when I first looked at Rudin that really bugged me as I tried to understand why this is praised as a holy book of the field.............
 
Mathematicians — particularly male ones — believe in a rite of passage. Whatever I had to endure, so should my students.
 
That sure does look like a rite passage type of book, education in attrition...
 
I mean, I taught courses out of Munkres's Topology and Guillemin & Pollack through my career; but I think those are excellent texts and are hard to beat. (I realize that there are other options for Munkres. Not so for G&P.)
But then I decided I could do better for other courses ... Opinions of course are quite varied on whether I succeeded.
 
10:35 PM
Yea, but Munkres's Topology has some little pictures (well the 2nd edition), of course I'm going to be revsiting it now with a better knowledge base in a few months
As you know I'm working through your text, before my geometry hiccup, I had planned on going: your text$\rightarrow$ Munkres's Analysis on Manifolds $\rightarrow$ Baby Rudin (or an equivalent) $\rightarrow$ Royden (or something equivalent).
But since I'm a prisoner of time like every body else.......I was wondering if there is even any reason to do Munkres's Analysis or does your book cover it all to the same extent?
 
First, if you really learn my book, you've done almost all of Munkres's Analysis on Manifolds. There's very little missing (you can learn abstract tensors to do differential forms if you really want to). But that means doing plenty of proof exercises in mine.
Ah, I already answered that.
 
Great, that is good news. What do you think about the rest of my "progression"?
 
There are other analysis books to tackle other than Rudin. For graduate work in statistics, I agree that a solid foundation in analysis and even some measure theory would be good.
Let's see what level you get to by the time you get later in my book. The jury is still out on whether my book is feasible for you.
 
That's my plan....in the fall I'm supposed to take a cross listed upper year/grad level course in MAthematical Statistics.............but I agree, let's see where I'm at a little later on in your text.
 
The Math Stat course will use some double integration, but sadly probably very little linear algebra. Maybe your course is better than the one at UGA was.
 
10:41 PM
Thanks for the input.
 
i like rudin's real analysis book a lot, until the multivar stuff and measure theory. then it's a mess.
folland's real analysis is better than royden in my opinion. it has more pictures.
 
You earned a Ph.D. in analysis. You're not a fair judge for its applicability to a generic math major.
There's way too much point set topology for what is needed at the beginning of an analysis course. That kills most students off the bat.
 
Oh....well I audited this course I'm planning on taking a year or so ago, when I was naieve to how prepared I was.....this course is touching on measure theory, way past double integration and a little linear algebra
 
people taught out of ross when i was an undergrad. that book is OK but does almost everything in terms of sequences, which isn't great, but is fine for most purposes. i still think in sequences (or nets).
 
Wow, that is a much more sophisticated course, then, @dc3rd. Good.
 
10:44 PM
that level that you mentioned was done in 2nd year math stats.
 
i also like the analytical preliminaries in riesz and sz.-nagy's functional analysis, but of course i would say that. and it's definitely not a first course.
 
I took a course from Rudin as a freshman from a probabilist who was just as ungeometric as Rudin in his teaching style. It was horrid.
Oh, gotcha, dc3rd. I didn't realize you had two levels. My bad.
That said, @leslie, I taught a reading course from Rudin to two of my strongest math major students who'd gotten A's from me in my multivariable math course. They both went on to get PhDs, one in math (now a fabulous career in Britain) and one in math finance.
 
i took a course from rudin from a topologist postdoc who had clearly never done any analysis. it was not a good introduction to the book. as you say, we spent a lot of time in chapter 2.
 
I think the usual course was using Abbott and I knew that was way too low-level for those guys.
 
chapter 2 should, for all intents and purposes, be deleted
 
10:47 PM
Interestingly, I never asked to teach the undergrad analysis course. I taught the Spivak honors freshman course 15 times instead ;)
 
and she was very focused on counterexamples. i think that's not a good way to approach really any subject, but especially analysis.
 
Yea. The 2nd year math stats used Rice's Mathematical Statistics book, the upper year/grad course is along the lines of Atherya's Measure THeory and Probability
 
incidentally i love the name "sz.-nagy." it's like even the hungarians decided "no, we're not writing all of that out"
 
I like the example/counterexample game for sure, for every subject. Point-set topology seems particularly enamored of the counterexamples. I like that for multivariable analysis at places, too, but more for exercises.
@dc3rd I'd say you have to make a lot of progress before that.
 
i think we spent more time on counterexamples to the fundamental theorem of calculus, and defects in the riemann integral, which seems like an enormous waste of time to me, than we did on the actual fundamental theorem of calculus, or proving things about functions that people actually encounter in the wild.
 
10:49 PM
Although I doubt your fellow stat grad students would do too well with my book.
 
i did have a lot of fun with counterexamples in an unbounded operators class. it made more sense there.
 
Yup....I do.......glimpsed at the text....got the vague idea of what Borel sets are and noped out of that and climbed back down to the bottom of the tree
 
there are two types of people: those who read Steen & Seebach in their free time, and sane people
 
@leslie My multivariable analysis course as a sophomore — the one B I got in math undergrad — was taught by an algebraic geometry postdoc who was not a great teacher. Ironic.
 
Well I don't have any fellow grad students yet because I'm not one myself....🙃
 
10:51 PM
It was a Fleming course ... MIT hadn't yet split multivariable analysis and Lebesgue integration into two separate courses. So it was combination of both.
Well, @dc3rd, that sounds like it really is meant for grad students.
 
my worst grade in undergrad was a C+ in (ironically) linear algebra.
 
I wonder how much that happens ... that we specialize in things we did worst in.
Actually, I think he just graded tougher. Artin definitely should have given me a B or two instead of A's.
 
the instructor was a geometer who loved drawing hyperplanes and distilling things to their pictorial essence. not my guy at all.
 
Oh, I'd approve of that course ;)
 
it worked for all of my friends and not me.
 
10:52 PM
THere's plenty of rigorous proofs that go along with the pictures.
 
I truly think it is @TedShifrin, because even the analysis stuff I had retained didn't really figure in those first few lectures I attneded........could also be because my skills were weak.........
 
I draw all the pictures, of course, but I give the rigorous linear algebra proofs along with them. I don't know why that's bad.
 
but I'm also stuck between a rock and hard place and somewhat need to do the course in my undergrad in order to have any modicum of being able to apply to a masters.......
 
i'd definitely draw the pictures if i could draw them. i would sometimes draw schematics. "here's the idea." [scribble scribble scribble] "now let's see if we can turn this into algebra."
 
@dc3rd At UGA that level of math was only in the Ph.D.-level stat courses.
 
10:54 PM
my first 'real' linear algebra course was from lester dubins, who was phenomenally unprepared, but very good at 'thinking on his feet.' and very impressionistic with diagrams. it worked for me and not for my friends.
 
What I recall of a Dubins lecture was intolerably bad boardwork.
 
he was a good example of the prof who basically can't be bothered to prepare anything he isn't interested in. not a model of professional responsibility.
 
@TedShifrin, the way that the course is set up it wouldn't surprise me that it does have PhD concepts in it....it is truly the UofT way of doing things, that whole rite of passage and attrition thing.......
breaking you down spiritually
 
Basic linear algebra is one of the only places where I always prepared matrices ahead of time (not much else). One has to have things rigged to get the reduced echelon form one wants without a mess.
 
and my notes from that class are useless. but it was taught out of axler, so of course i was going to like it.
 
10:56 PM
LOL, you showed up here after our many times slamming Sheldon's book. (He and I were compatriots in grad school.)
 
yes. i know it is not well liked. he doesn't need you, he has me.
 
LOL
 
why isn't Adler's book liked?
 
there's something very moronic and early 20th century and hypermasculine about the attrition model, the lord of the flies bullshit. the phrase 'baby rudin' applied to a book that is definitely not for babies tells you all you need to know.
 
I actually defended him, though, to some undergrad who was complaining about something ...
Well, that appellation is only because of the other two advanced books.
Never meant to suggest it was baby-level.
 
10:58 PM
i think his other books are worse than that one. someone who learns complex analysis from walter rudin should probably be kept in an institution.
many people don't like axler because he takes forever to get to matrices, and they're just a fact of linear algebra life. technically all of the stuff (including jordan canonical form) is in there, but not presented in a way that makes it operable.
 
The idea of putting real and complex together is a good one, though. There are places in complex where one really wants to have DCT, etc.
 
From my naieve view point I would've thought putting the two together would be ideal
 
Axler's approach is very ring-theoretic, and totally avoids all geometry in linear algebra.
 
but I guess it's not............?
 
It is pedagogically difficult, because every university has separate graduate courses for the two parts of it.
 
11:00 PM
Well I could definitely see why you wouldn't like it at all then @TedShifrin, and you have seemed to convert me because I'm liking the geometry a lot more...
 
Same reason my multivariable math book is not widely adopted. A school needs to create a course just for that, because otherwise undergrads are taught linear algebra and multivariable calculus/analysis in separate courses.
 
a lot of axler is silently avoiding anything that doesn't also hold true at least for compact operators in infinite dimensions. it's like he doesn't want to do all of matrix algebra, only the stuff that generalizes. which is actually right up my alley but i would not want to teach out of it. when i taught linear algebra, it was, let's do boxes of numbers. let's look at one-dimensional slices of this problem.
 
@dc3rd I actually do like the module theory in linear algebra, but I think it belongs in an integrated algebra/linear algebra treatment like Artin's book. Real math majors need to know and use determinants, not avoid them because Axler doesn't like them.
 
he's very much thinking about what will generalize to infinite dimensional hilbert spaces, and not what generalizes to... a huge amount of other algebra and geometry.
which is why he's right and the rest of the world is wrong.
 
But, even for someone who is against geometry, @leslie, you would teach students the importance of the orthogonality of the kernel and the range of the adjoint (row space in undergraduate speak).
One of the top-selling basic texts (Lay) doesn't even mention dot product until the last third of the book. I think that is heretical.
In my books, it's in section 2 of the book.
 
11:03 PM
i'm fine with orthogonality. i love orthogonality. even almost orthogonality. but that is as far as i will go. don't make me draw cones or hyperplanes. i refuse
 
LOL ... you can muster a line.
I think students only develop intuition for higher-dimensional math and linear algebra with some of these pictures you hate.
 
whats intuition
 
I agree with that comment
 
We'll see how @dc3rd does with some of my videos :)
 
i would bore people to death about orthogonality. there was always that hiccup near the end of linear algebra where you have to introduce orthogonality of functions and inner products that aren't dot products. i mostly proceeded from formulas.
 
11:05 PM
I love your vids.....to this point the lectures I listen to I'm always redrawing the pitures.....
 
Well, I admit I have no picture to draw for why $\sin mt$ and $\cos nt$ are orthogonal. They're just orthogonal vectors.
 
but we'll see if I'm come for you when I get to deeper vids
 
that actually reminds me of a scene from the class i got a C+ in. the prof had shown the orthogonality of the usual trigonometric basis of a function space. an engineering student raised his hand and asked "what does that mean?" i think this is a well posed question, possibly explainable in terms of how you can pick of coefficients with inner products instead of doing more complicated solving of linear systems.
 
In other words, analysis inner products are indeed formulas. Even I can't get around that.
 
the professor responded "it means that those integrals are equal to zero."
 
11:07 PM
Yeah, orthogonality of $e^{int}$ is as basic as orthogonality of the standard basis in $\Bbb R^n$ or $\Bbb R^\infty$. But what does it mean?
 
"now let's draw a picture to illustrate what's going on, draws commutative diagram"
 
now that is language I can understand
 
I guess I can offer some musical interpretations of the orthogonality, if I try.
The change of basis formula is just a commutative diagram. You'll even find it in my books. So there!
 
There's a concrete proof, but that's really the only way to remember the silly thing. :)
 
11:10 PM
This is in Bretscher but his discussion is awfully phrased. My students had a very hard time with that section of his book.
 
i did try to show people sound interpretations of orthogonality. it didn't work. i may have overestimated the appetite for people to look at waveforms. dubins once said that the fourier transform was a tunnel you crawled through and things made sense on the other side without you knowing the reason why. there's something subtle that you can't remove about it.
 
But now we live in a digital processing world, @leslie, so Fourier transforms are part of life.
@MikeM: Which is in Bretscher? Change of basis or understanding $L^2$ orthogonality?
 
Change of basis as commutative diagram.
 
Ah.
 
His phrasing is very poor. I only understood it because I knew what he wanted to say.
 
11:13 PM
yeah, everything is fourier transforms. dubins said he got that tunnel metaphor from bruno de finetti.
 
I don't know that name, @leslie.
@MikeM: Isn't Bretscher in its infinite edition by now? Surely someone should have complained about the lack of clarity.
 
he was a probabilist. dubins tended to shift the conversation to his favorite topics. i took real analysis 2 from him and it was mostly finitely additive measure theory for statistical applications that nobody was familiar with.
 
Ugh.
 
I also dislike his notation for beta-coordinates. It seems precisely backwards to me. He says [x,y]_beta = [a,b] to mean "the vector [x,y] in standard cords is av_1 + bv_2."
I write a vector without subscript to mean standard coordinates, always.
 
it did lead to hilarity during my qualifying exam when i was asked for something measure theoretic and proved the finitely additive version. and of course, the countably additive version is a limit of that. nobody saw that coming.
 
11:15 PM
I write vectors in beta-coords with a beta subscript to remind us the coordinates, when there's risk of confusion.
 
Well, why do we need to say "in standard coords" there? It means that the vector equals the vector.
 
If x is a vector I write [x]_beta = (a, b)_beta to mean "when you've written x in beta-coords, it's (a, b)_beta."
 
Oh, right, OK.
 
the linear algebra book i mostly taught out of it iowa did the same thing. way too much decoration with bases, including things that genuinely did live in R^n and actually were lists of numbers.
 
I wouldn't write coordinates there. I would write $\vec x_\beta$.
 
11:16 PM
This leads to the potentially awkward [ (x,y) ]_beta = (a,b)_beta as my preferred way to say what he wanted to.
Sure, I would too when I'm not trying to write a specific coordinate expression for some specific vector.
 
I try to downplay all this in both my books. Now I'm going to look to see what I did.
 
I think the mass of notation is hard to get out of without being dreadfully unclear.
It does make it the hardest section to parse, I think. Maybe second to formulas for determinants.
 
down with determinants. somebody said that once. he was wrong, but morally he was right.
 
I find you a great conversationalist but I don't think I agree with a single one of your opinions about math.
 
I mostly talked about $[T]_{\mathscr B}$, but if I needed what you're talking about I wrote $C_{\mathscr B}(\vec x)$.
 
11:18 PM
hahaha
 
If there's one thing I know about Adler and reading the preface is his disdain of determinants @leslietownes
 
That's not a bad choice
 
But I agree that most books confuse students totally on this stuff.
 
i think most of DwD was a branding exercise. for that, it works. if i discovered a similar way of branding myself i would be a successful mathematician.
 
I have a midterm in two weeks so I can find out if they understood me.
 
11:20 PM
we bought a toy for our cat, it is a ball that is captive within a ring, you can bat it around but not get it out. my daughter is fixated on getting the ball out. she's actually yelling about this. this is a metaphor for much of my experience with mathematics. why is life so hard. why is the one thing i want to do not the thing i can do.
 
@MikeM: leslie is here to help balance out the room against you, me, and Balarka.
Thor is more talented at topology, I think, than he wants to admit.
 
i told her that she just needs to perform an eversion of the torus, but this didn't seem to help.
 
The cat will figure out how to do it.
 
maybe she'll be smarter when she turns 3.
i'm going to write a linear algebra book called 'down with linear combinations of things.' i reject the notion of a span. i'll find some other way to do it.
 
I think @leslie is going to become acquainted with my transcendental eye-rolls and smacks.
 
11:25 PM
i'm lucky that emojis don't seem to be supported on this server. i can see them now.
 
Alessandro and Astyx can always search for the maximal number of eye-rolls I've given, but I may have to give you $e^8 + \pi^5$ eye-rolls for starters.
 
i am notorious around my office for talking what is colloquially referred to as sh*t. i have seen the eye rolls, maybe not that many of them. it's only getting worse as i get older.
 
@leslietownes 😀😁😂🤣😃😄😅😆
 
You can always count on Leaky!
 
well, as the brits say, that's me told.
thank you for choosing among the friendliest emojis.
peter lax's functional analysis book is amazing. nobody asked. that's an answer to a question that nobody asked.
i wish i were still a mathematician just so i could teach out of that book.
 
11:36 PM
Often, the stars in a field really do write good stuff. Often, that is also false.
 
that book is also a source of my first real beef with amazon dot com. there was some discount i had that applied to the purchase of the book. it was applied to my order. due to some timeline issues, the discount was no longer active at the time of shipping and i was billed for the full amount. i emailed their customer support explaining how the price of the book had literally changed between purchase and shipment and this did not seem to be in the spirit of the discount.
i had maybe five back and forths with clueless customer support people who were not engaging with my issue, and then i gave up. jeff bezos owes me ten dollars.
stars write the best books and the worst books.
 
Jeff Bezos needed your $10 to make his latest trillion.
I hate myself that I support Amazon at all. And I was livid when they took over Whole Foods.
 
same. it's shameful, i'm killing businesses that i would probably otherwise want to use. and we give hundreds to whole foods every month. normal grocery stores aren't cheaper. that's how he gets you.
my mother lives on a fixed income and makes most of her purchases through my amazon account. i hate lining the pockets of extractive, soul-sucking billionaires, but there's no other route for me to simply and easily support my mother.
 
Actually, normal grocery stores still are cheaper for the most part. I've started driving 50 miles every Sunday morning to buy produce at a farmers market, so that has helped. That's not cheap, either, though; it's just great stuff.
I used to love supporting local neighborhood bookstores (particularly gay-owned ones) in Atlanta, but they gradually disappeared.
 
one thing that annoys me about long beach is the absence of a farmer's market. iowa city had a great one. berkeley too.
 
11:42 PM
Berkeley has Monterey Market, which in the 60s and in the late 70s, was always a treasure trove.
 
iowa city also had a great food co-op. long beach is deficient in this regard. you need a college town for a proper co-op.
 
San Diego has at least one of those, to which I belonged. But when I moved, I called and gave them my new address, and they "forgot" to change their records, so my membership has lapsed.
 
berkeley also has berkeley bowl, which people swear by but i did not think was great. i lived near yasai market on college avenue. i could spend $20 there and eat vegetarian for a week.
 
I wasn't going to shop there again until the pandemic is done with, anyhow.
Yeah, Berkeley Bowl was certainly there in my time, but I stuck with Monterey Market.
And the wonderful Cheese Board. Fun on a $325 a month grad student support.
 
i gave my mom the cheese board cookbook and she makes pastries out of it when i visit. which hasn't been in two years but they had some wicked scones.
and of course the pizza.
my dad turned down the option of managing an apartment building a block from chez panisse to work in local journalism. i like to wonder about how my life would have been different had i grown up in berkeley.
would i be more radically left wing? or would i have rebelled against my environment. nobody will ever know. i would have had earlier experiences with delicious food.
 
11:50 PM
I grew up through the age of 13 in Berkeley, then Boston area. I'm left-wing, but not a commie radical.
 
As the resident chef @TedShifrin, you might be able to suggest a simple, healthy, and tasty recipe that uses tofu?
need a new idea for a side for my meal prep
and bought tofu today to try something new
 
I use tofu a lot (in Asian preparations). Did you get firm/extra-firm or soft? Applications will depend on that.
 
"medium firm" tofu....
that's the packaging at least
Asian preparations work, probably more tasty too.
 
Medium. OK. I like to cut it in little cubes, drain it, then dry it off in paper towels and either fry it in a little oil (with salt sprinkled) or stick it in the air fryer with a little oil on it (with salt sprinkled). You can then add to stir-fried vegetables or whatever with a tasty sauce. Or stick it in salads with peanuts and whatever.
I can't do better than that without knowing what's in your refrigerator and pantry :P
But yeah, Chinese or Thai chili sauces, a bit of soy, sesame oil, some spice are good :)
 
@TedShifrin read only this message and was wondering what kind of geometric object this built
 
11:57 PM
The stir fried option sounds good......the fridge has an array of veggies (probably put some mushrooms in the mix),....all the maintream veggies and then pickeled radish and kimchi as well.............I wonder if a tofu and kimchi mix would taste good thinking about it...
 
Yeah, you could do that for sure. Probably a few milder things, too.
Cute, @BigSocks :)
 
thanks for the inspiration.....got some ideas for preparation tomorrow
 

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