Difference between revisions of "User:Msellke"

Revision as of 22:28, 29 April 2018

Things I like

• Math
• Tennis
• Number Theory
• Roger Federer
• Ping-pong
• Analysis
• Pokémon
• Probability
• Tasty food
• Elliptic regularity
• Cool temperatures
• Additive Combinatorics
• Floor Pi
• Copying Jingyi
• Playing Smash poorly
• Algebraic Topology
• Clean dishes
• Thanksgiving dinner
• Freshmen

Things I dislike

• Euclidean geometry
• Rafael Nadal
• Non-Euclidean geometry
• Freshman GIRs
• Simmons Hall
• Algebraic geometry
• The college admissions system
• Differential geometry (actually this one is ok)
• Dirty dishes
• Tropical geometry
• HASS requirements
• Computational geometry
• Coding
• Finite geometry
• The laboratory requirement
• Other geometry

Classes

Fall 2014

18.715 (Representation Theory; Pavel Etingof)- I thought this class was wonderful. The problem sets were generally interesting and thoughtful (though long), and the material was beautiful. Highly recommended if you're comfortable with linear algebra and willing to work. The category theory at the end wasn't very good though.

6.046 (Algorithms; Dana Moshkovitz and Richard Peng)- I didn't like this class much. I found it not very interesting, and lectures were slow.

7.012 (Freshman biology; Eric Lander and Bob Weinberg)- I thought this class was surprisingly good, despite being a GIR. Test grading was kind of sketchy, but Lander was a great lecturer.

24.900 (Intro Linguistics; Adam Albright)- This class (a CI-H) was pretty cool at first, but the later material got pretty boring. I didn't like the early essays because they didn't have anything to do with the class. The big project was cool though; you interview somebody who speaks an unfamiliar language. Because of P/NR, I just gave up on the class for the last month.

Spring 2015

18.318 (Extremal Combinatorics; Choongbum Lee) - Material was pretty cool; I finally learned what the regularity lemma actually says. Was not much work.

18.783 (Elliptic Curves; Andrew Sutherland) - I really liked this class. The beginning focused on curves over finite fields, and had a lot of emphasis on efficient algorithms and coding, neither of which I found great. It then moved to curves over the complex numbers which was really cool. Problem sets took a long time but were generally interesting. Lecture notes were fantastic, so missing lecture wasn't a problem.

21H.141 (Renaissance Europe; Jeffrey Ravel) - My second CI-H. I kind of like history, but unfortunately this time period is all about religion, which I don't really care about. The essays were all pretty annoying, so I didn't like the class much.

24.111 (Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics; Bradford Skow) -The first month of this class was just linear algebra. Overall very easy HASS credit.

Fall 2015

18.755 (Lie Groups; David Vogan) - Fairly disorganized lectures, but good psets. I just skipped classes, read the book, and did the psets. It went pretty well.

18.155 (Differential Analysis; Richard Melrose) - We spent the first half of the class on distributions, and basically went through Friedlander and Joshi. Then we did some other functional analysis and PDE stuff that was pretty disorganized. I thought the class was decent, and it is probably better with other professors.

18.177 (Topics in Stochastic Processes; Scott Sheffield) - This class was amazing. We learned about a bunch of crazy mathematical physics stuff. Lectures were relaxed, and we read a couple survey articles for homework, then read and wrote about a research paper as a final project. I think at least 80% of the value from my classes this semester came from this one.

21M.600 (Intro to Acting; Olivia) - Olivia was great. Classes started with yoga and vocal warm-ups, and then she had us run around and be crazy every class to practice not being self-conscious. Homework was mainly practicing acting scenes, so there wasn't too much and it was very educational. Definitely would recommend this class.

3.091 (Freshman Chemistry) - Mehhhhh.

Spring 2016

18.156 (Differential Analysis 2; Larry Guth) - Best class I've taken here. You don't actually need 18.155, just good general familiarity with measure theory and functional analysis. Guth makes the topics fit together really well and the homework is also really good. Highly recommended for analysts.

18.176 (Stochastic Calculus; Dan Stroock) - Pretty good. Stroock's blackboard usage is pretty terrible but the material is pretty interesting. He also tells lots of great stories from back in the day.

18.099 (Discrete Analysis; Peter Csikvari) - This was an independent study class with 7 students (5 on hall!). We covered chapters 4, 10, 11 of Tao and Vu's additive combinatorics book. We each gave 3 lectures and formed small groups for final projects. I thought this class went quite well; it was helpful to organize a formal class rather than just find some people to read with, because borderline people are more likely to join if they get credit. Unfortunately we did not get CI-M credit.