Difference between revisions of "User:Bpchen"

Revision as of 01:32, 21 May 2016

Hi. I'm Brian. I currently live in M307. I am from Taiwan but know an alarming number of other people on floorpi from AoPS. I like math, computer science, singing, puzzles, dragons, and lots of other stuff.

Ooh, an infobox! (My courses are only tentative; I have an open mind with regards to changing or dropping majors. But it looks cool!)

As of Fall 2015, I'm on HistoryComm with Steven which means I'm in charge of maintaining the wiki, among other stuff. Yay! Fill out your user pages, folks! (For people who like fancy things, Wikipedia's page on wiki markup is helpful.)

Classes

Fall 2015

• 5.111, Principles of Chemical Science: Well, it's a GIR. I liked the lectures and lecturers (van Voorhis, Shoulders); they kept the whole thing at least somewhat engaging. Other parts, like the online problems, were decidedly meh.
• 6.046J/18.410J, Design and Analysis of Algorithms: Coming from an extensive competitive programming background, I probably don't have any thoughts or opinions on this class that would be helpful to others.
• 8.022, Physics II (Electricity and Magnetism): The professor (Ashoori) is a cool guy and there are cool experiments, but the hardest parts of lecture consist of a sea of equations and it was hard for me to to see the forest for the trees often. On the other hand, my TA (Zwierlein) was super awesome.
• 17.309J/ESD.082J/STS.082J, Science, Technology, and Public Policy: A CI course I have to keep spelling out. It's pretty intense; there are a lot of readings, two 10--15-page essays, and a midterm and final from an essay pool. The reward is the professor (Oye) intersperses awesome stories to tell throughout his lectures. The guy really gets around and never runs out of relevant tales of how he met so-and-so powerful political figure on an airplane, or gave a presentation to a room full of company CEOs, or whatever. I'm quite glad I took it, but I'd say you shouldn't take it unless you're sure you're interested in the material.
• 18.A34, Math Problem Solving (aka "Putnam Seminar"): Well, we do what it sounds like, solve vaguely Putnamesque problems but with lots of other weird things on the side.

Spring 2015

As preregistered and lotteried, 6.004, 6.01, 6.841J/18.405J, 18.034, 21M.011, 21M.301.

Highly prepared to drop 6.004; likely to replace 18.034 with 18.702 because there's no final and I get pset partners; might replace 6.01 with 6.S09 as people are recommending, but the scheduling is sketchy for that replacement.

Results:

• 6.01
• 6.841J/18.405J
• 18.702
• 21M.011
• 21M.301

Not Classes

• I like puzzles. Remotely, I hunted with Random twice and wrote a hunt with them once before coming to MIT. Once here, I participated three puzzle hunts (Simmons REX hunt, aquarium hunt, Mark Halpin's 2015 Labor Day Extravaganza) before classes started. I like puzzles.
• I like weird songs. I know the Pathery theme song (among many, many others) by heart.
• I did lots of mathematics and programming competitions in high school, and might keep doing them here. But you might have already guessed that?

Here's a Triple Back (from my blog, prior example and rules from MellowMelon).