I'm not aware of one where the donor is anonymous, but we have one that offers two $75 checks to a single parent in a science major on the condition that the money be used for R&R not bills or the like.

I think I would be pissed if I were a single parent and my kid needed shoes or something, and I wasn't allowed to spend the $75 on that

@0celouvsky "Thank you, mysterious benefactor. Yours, Revolver Ocelot. PS: If you stay anonymous so will I." :P

@0celouvsky You make it short and formal. You tell them that you are grateful for any help toward achieving your dream/plan of becoming [...].

Idk what I want to be

If you feel like it you promise to pay it forward when you are able.

A grad student somewhere, somehow

is that good enough?

@0celouvsky I would have thought that was obvious. You want to be Rigorous

Rigor is secondary to GDP.

@0celouvsky Go with a generic goal "a researcher" or something similar.

you want to be the Rigorest there is

@BenNiehoff Ew, no. I hate set theory.

Rigorously rich, then

Richly rigorous?

Who's writing a thank you letter?

Me

(sadly)

To whom?

I don't know.

Hm? Explain

I got an anonymous scholarship for an undisclosed amount

@BernardoMeurer just...read the chat

I have to write a thank you letter or I don't get the money

lol, I wonder if the amount is contingent on the quality of the letter?

@0celouvsky Ah, I can do that for you

If you run my code on the ORNL :)

@ACuriousMind Tsc, be quiet

Come to think of it, the notion of "pay it forward" would be a plausible reason for offering anonymous help. But you'd think they would mention it.

I think a character in a Heinlein book set up a "bread upon the waters" fund for that kind of thing.

Wait - how do you even get picked for such an anonymous scholarship?

Might have been Friday Jones.

@ACuriousMind Good GPA

@ACuriousMind Generally the trustees have some kind of instructions. For scholarships funded through a trust, anyway.

@ACuriousMind I wrote an essay n' shit

A nice chub and tuck

Are these people creepily hovering around campus and thinking "Ah, yep, that guy over there looks smart, I'm gonna give him money"?

@ACuriousMind Actually, that's a good point. Your academic record is protected by privacy laws

@ACuriousMind I wrote an essay about sobolev spaces

So, how does an anonymous donor know who they should give a scholarship to?

not even kidding

@BenNiehoff Not if the school runs malware

@BenNiehoff You can sign the protection away for specific purposes. Applying for scholarships is such a purpose.

unless it's something like "Give $5000 to each of your top 50 students"

@0celouvsky How do you send the essay to the right people if you don't know who they are?

@dmckee But he didn't apply for the scholarship

@BenNiehoff I had to check a box that said they could look at my transcript

I'm very confused about this whole situation

@ACuriousMind I filled out an application via the math department

@BenNiehoff He says he wrote and essay.

oh, you did apply?

ok

Yes

my situation I brought up earlier happened totally out of the blue

@0celouvsky Will you buy me Shankar with the money?

So you applied, but you don't know what you applied for? :D

You've owed me that book for months now

@BernardoMeurer No, I just bought the $200 book on heat flow

Most of the scholarships at my place are administered through a single office, so there is a (rather short and simple) unified application.

No money for you

:/

No fair

I'm calling Kat

@BernardoMeurer Dude get michelle to give me the money

it's only $30

You lost that bet, you owe me that book

In other cases the department is charged with selecting the winners. We do a few each spring during a faculty meeting.

I talked to Bob about weather stations and 5K displays

@ACuriousMind I applied for five scholarships with that application. But I don't know which one(s) I got or how much each is.

@0celouvsky Okay, that's beginning to make a bit more sense

I hate applying for things :\

I still think that's a weird system, but at least it's a system

@BenNiehoff who doesn't?

I didn't claim to be unique or anything

Bureaucrats

@BenNiehoff Good thing this is not an application then ;)

is that supposed to be a wholesome meme

can an AI be wholesome?

I don't know what that means

reddit.com/r/wholesomememes

knowyourmeme.com/memes/wholesome-memes

I can't into internet

lol

there we go

@ACuriousMind do you understand now?

I'm beginning to

What did I say that's so wholesome?

"Good thing this is not an application then ;)"

You were implying he's unique and special and that life/chat is not an application process

you reassured me that this chat is not an application

I'm pretty sure it's a trick!

@0celouvsky Hm, my intended meaning was that you should always claim on applications that you're soooo unique, so it's good this isn't one because he'd have failed it by admitting he's not special :P

Oh well

maybe I was just using reverse psychology!

after all, doesn't everyone talk about how unique they are?

if I don't do that, I'll stand out

Does anyone know the password for CAP exam?

the previous solutions?

I did the problems but forgot to email them and now its too late

Oh hey, it's an M-theory lord. Prove you deserve your name and answer all my unanswered questions, please :P

Also, what is the CAP exam?

ok ill try

Lord of the U(1)'s

the CAP exam is a physics competition

for qualifying to the canadian national team

@ACuriousMind So can you justify to me why $\phi\to 0$ "at infinity"

and what that even means for a general manifold

just say "it's compactly supported" on a general manifold :P

@ACuriousMind why should a field be compactly supported?

and I don't have anything new to say to that discussion that I haven't already said

wow

im out of my league

@ACuriousMind I wasn't aware we've had this discussion before.

@0celouvsky oO

?

I think I remember pretty well you asking me at least twice about that same thing

Uh...

Huh

I don't remember that

@ACuriousMind that I do remember

Not very long conversations, granted, but I don't have that much to say about it, really

it's also a different conversation

Well, if you only look at the action on compact subsets then you can omit the "falling off toward infinity" bit

That's what I meant by us being only interested in the theory inside a box in the more recent conversation

@ACuriousMind Yeah but you can have finite actions over the whole space where the fields don't die off

You most certainly can

So...

As I said, the infinite-volume theory is really to be thought of as a limit of a theory in ever-growing boxes. "Falling off at infinity" is just a boundary condition, there's nothing that forces you choose it if you just consider the infinite-volume theory from the beginning

yeah yeah, no need to repeat yourself

@ACuriousMind How do things like Donaldson's theorem come about? I'm looking at the proof in this book and the proof itself is like 6 pages long. That's not counting all of the work beforehand

That's not really a "trial and error" process

That you will have to ask Donaldson :P

@ACuriousMind I'm guessing it was a bunch of lemmas in a bunch of papers and was eventually brought together. But in this book they decided to make it a whole unified section

Hi, everybody.

@BernardoMeurer when do you think we'll have time to get comatosely drunk?

You're going to be too horrified by measure theory to drink

you're gonna turn to god

Probably as soon as you being saying the word "measure"

@BernardoMeurer My goal will be to do 1-D Lebesgue integration

I will spare you the gore of product measures

Hopefully by then I will have been released of the tyranny of this school