Difference between revisions of "User:Vywang"

Revision as of 02:59, 1 September 2014

Hello! I'm Victor, a sophomore transfer from 4W.

I have an MIT webpage here with some standard info (including classes at the bottom, with some commentary).

Things

• Social stuffs (might add more later)
• Music: ~year-long (and counting) hiatus from piano, quit violin in high school, 21M.301 (Fall 2014). (might add more later)
• Exercise/sports: tennis, badminton (took some gym classes), running, lifting. (might add more later)
• Cooking: laziness. (might add more later)

Philosophy

• I think life, at least in the long run, is funny because once AI inevitably takes over the universe, even if all the friendly AI initiatives succeed, AI will in principle outpace humanity in every possible interesting aspect. (Cf. humans vs. other animals: but do the lesser beasts consciously realize their lack of souls and opposable thumbs, as we would recognize our inferiority to AI?) Someone once suggested to me that humanities will still remain (even though everything else is doomed), perhaps almost by definition, but I think this could only possibly hold in the sense of the AI not actually "caring" about humanities (rather than "being worse at" humanities).
• Somehow the previous point, despite being extremely boring and stupid, is actually enlightening to me, because it says somehow, at least from the selfish/self-important human lens, that constant terms matter, not just higher-order terms (contrary to typical math philosophizing...). For example, I think a lot of people talk about how helping a few gifted students maximize their potential much outweighs the potential benefit of helping many "normal" students, but... More broadly, I think there's very little reason to take life (esp. stuff like overly-critical/non-obvious suggestions---it's so easy to "fake-justify" almost anything) seriously, except in improving the world to the point where everyone else can take life unseriously too...
• Creativity, imagination, dreams, visions, inspiration, passion, hard work, but not at the cost of happiness (might add more later)
• Openness, friendliness. Bureaucracy, unnecessarily unequal opportunities. (might add more later)

Boring stories

Sometimes I think good stories are the only inspiring things, both in math and real life. Here are some bad stories.

• In May 2014, I procrastinated on my final 24.900 essay long enough to miss the (volunteer-based) weekend-long USAMO 2014 grading at Le Meridien. The next day I ran into Po-Shen Loh (CMU) and his mathematical brother Jacob Fox in the math building, and Po asked me why I missed grading. He's a fast talker so I didn't have to answer.
• In August 2014, I got my wisdom teeth removed. Apparently my bottom wisdom teeth (at least the right bottom one) had 3 root canals or something, while most have 2. Also I believe the doctor said "uh-oh" at some point; perhaps this is related to the <math>3 > 2</math> (hmm, I'm impressed the greater than sign doesn't screw tags up). Also laughing gas is weird, but apparently by constricting/clenching legs and fists it seems to be easier to keep control.
• Speaking of screwing tags up, at one point I found an issue in the HMMT problem database, and asked Travis: "Is there a way to use $<$ and $>$ (and other (html?) things I'm probably forgetting right now) without screwing things up half the time? I don't know if > and < are standard but I've used them elsewhere before (they don't work here)." The issue: "It turns out the problem was with '>' characters whose index in the string was a multiple of 3 (e.g., its the third character in "$a>b$"). It's fixed now, thanks for pointing it out!" "yeah... turns out 2012Travis didn't know what he was doing"