-## College Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy
+# College Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy
Previously, [I wrote about how I was considering going back to San Francisco State University for two semesters](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2024/05/should-i-finish-my-bachelors-degree/) to finish up my Bachelor's degree in math.
To be clear, "better than I expected" is not an endorsement of college. SF State is still the same communist dystopia I remember from a dozen years ago—a bureaucratic command economy dripping in propaganda about how indispensible and humanitarian it is, whose subjects' souls have withered to the point where, even if they don't quite believe the propaganda, they can't conceive of life and work outside the system.
+
+
But it didn't hurt this time, because I had a sense of humor about it now—and a sense of perspective (thanks to life experience, no thanks to school). Ultimately, [policy debates should not appear one-sided](https://www.readthesequences.com/Policy-Debates-Should-Not-Appear-One-Sided): if things are terrible, it's probably not because people are choosing the straightforwardly terrible thing for no reason whatsoever, with no trade-offs, coordination problems, or nonobvious truths making the terrible thing look better than it is. The thing that makes life under communism unbearable is the fact that you can't leave. Having escaped, and coming back as a visiting dignitary, one is a better position to make sense of how and why the regime functions—the problems it solves, at whatever cost in human lives or dignity—the forces that make it stable if not good.
-### Doing It Right This Time (Math)
+## Doing It Right This Time (Math)
The undergraduate mathematics program at SFSU has three tracks: for "advanced studies", for teaching, and for liberal arts. My student record from 2013 was still listed as on the advanced studies track. In order to graduate as quickly as possible, I switched to the liberal arts track, which, beyond a set of "core" courses, only requires five electives numbered 300 or higher. The only core course I hadn't completed was "Modern Algebra I", and I had done two electives in Fall 2012 ("Mathematical Optimization" and "Probability and Statistics I"), so I only had four math courses (including "Modern Algebra I") to complete for the major.
-#### "Real Analysis II" (Fall 2024)
+### "Real Analysis II" (Fall 2024)
-My last class at SF State in Spring 2013 (before getting rescued by the software industry) had been [Real Analysis I"](https://math.sfsu.edu/courses/370) with Prof. Alex Schuster. I regret that I wasn't in a state to properly focus and savor it at the time: I [had a pretty bad sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic break in early February 2013](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) and for a few months thereafter was [mostly just trying to hold myself together](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/). I withdrew from my other classes ("Introduction to Functions of a Complex Variable" and "Urban Issues of Black Children and Youth") and ended up getting a B−.
+My last class at SF State in Spring 2013 (before getting rescued by the software industry) had been ["Real Analysis I"](https://math.sfsu.edu/courses/370) with Prof. Alex Schuster. I regret that I wasn't in a state to properly focus and savor it at the time: I [had a pretty bad sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic break in early February 2013](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) and for a few months thereafter was [mostly just trying to hold myself together](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/). I withdrew from my other classes ("Introduction to Functions of a Complex Variable" and "Urban Issues of Black Children and Youth") and ended up getting a B−.
My psychiatric impairment that semester was particularly disappointing because I had been looking forward to "Real Analysis I" as my first "serious" math class, being concerned with proving theorems rather than the "school-math" that most people associate with the subject, of applying given techniques to given problem classes. I had wanted to take it concurrently with the prerequsite, ["Exploration and Proof"](https://math.sfsu.edu/courses/301) (which I didn't consider sufficiently "serious") upon transferring to SFSU the previous semester, but was not permitted to. I had emailed Prof. Schuster asking to be allowed to enroll, with evidence that I was ready (attaching [a PDF of a small result I had proved about analogues of π under the _p_-norm](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/Davis-pi_in_Lp.pdf), and including the contact email of Prof. Robert Hasner of Diablo Valley College, who had been my "Calculus III" professor and had agreed to vouch for my preparedness), but he didn't reply.
Coming back eleven years later, I was eager to make up for that disappointment by picking up where I left off in "Real Analysis II" with the same Prof. Schuster. On the first day on instruction, I wore a collared shirt and tie (and mask, having contracted COVID-19 while traveling the previous week) and came to classroom early to make a point of marking my territory, using the whiteboard to write out the first part of a proof of the multivariate chain rule that I was working through in Bernd S. W. Schröder's _Mathematical Analysis: A Concise Introduction_—my favorite analysis textbook, which I had discovered in the SFSU library in 2012 and subsequently bought my own copy. (I would soon check up on the withdrawal stamp sheet in the front of the library's copy. No one had checked it out in the intervening twelve years.)
-The University Bulletin officially titled the course "Real Analysis II: Several Variables", so you'd expect trying to get a leg up on the multidimensional chain rule would be studying ahead for the course, but it turned out that the Bulletin was lying relative to the syllabus that Prof. Schuster had emailed out the week before: we would be covering series, series of functions, and metric space topology. Fine. (I was already pretty familiar with metric space topology, but even my "non-epsilon" calculus-level knowledge of series was weak; to me, the topic stunk of school.)
+
+
+The University Bulletin officially titled the course "Real Analysis II: Several Variables", so you'd expect that getting a leg up on the multidimensional chain rule would be studying ahead for the course, but it turned out that the Bulletin was lying relative to the syllabus that Prof. Schuster had emailed out the week before: we would be covering series, series of functions, and metric space topology. Fine. (I was already pretty familiar with metric space topology, but even my "non-epsilon" calculus-level knowledge of series was weak; to me, the topic stunk of school.)
-"Real II" was an intimate class that semester, befitting the SFSU's status as a [garbage-tier institution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_in_the_United_States#Map_of_R2_institutions): there were only seven or eight students enrolled. It was one of many classes in the department that were cross-listed as both a graduate ("MATH 770") and upper-division undergraduate course ("MATH 470"). I was the only student enrolled in 470. The university website [hosted an old syllabus from 2008](http://archive.today/2025.08.14-233957/https://math.sfsu.edu/courses/470) which said that the graduate students would additionally write a paper on an approved topic, but that wasn't a thing the way Prof. Schuster was teaching the class. Partway through the semester, I was added to Canvas (the online course management system) for the 770 class, to save Prof. Schuster and the TA the hassle of maintaining both.
+"Real II" was an intimate class that semester, befitting the SFSU's status as a [garbage-tier institution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_in_the_United_States#Map_of_R2_institutions): there were only seven or eight students enrolled. It was one of many classes in the department that were cross-listed as both a graduate ("MATH 770") and upper-division undergraduate course ("MATH 470"). I was the only student enrolled in 470. The university website [hosted an old syllabus from 2008](http://archive.today/2025.08.14-233957/https://math.sfsu.edu/courses/470) which said that the graduate students would additionally write a paper on an approved topic, but that wasn't a thing the way Prof. Schuster was teaching the course. Partway through the semester, I was added to Canvas (the online course management system) for the 770 class, to save Prof. Schuster and the TA the hassle of maintaining both.
The textbook was _An Introduction to Analysis_ (4th edition) by William R. Wade, the same book that had been used for "Real I" in Spring 2013. It felt in bad taste for reasons that are hard to precisely articulate. I want to say the tone is patronizing, but don't feel like I could defend that judgement in debate against someone who doesn't share it. What I love about Schröder is how it tries to simultaneously be friendly to the novice (the early chapters sprinkling analysis tips and tricks as numbered "Standard Proof Techniques" among the numbered theorems and definitions) while also showcasing the fearsome technicality of the topic in excruciatingly detailed estimates (proofs involving chains of inequalities, typically ending on "< ε"). In contrast, Wade often feels like it's hiding something from children who are now in fact teenagers.
There were two examinations: a midterm, and the final. Each involved stating some definitions, identifying some propositions as true or false with a brief justification, and writing two or three proofs. A reference sheet was allowed, which made the definitions portion somewhat farcical as a test of anything more than having bothered to prepare a reference sheet. (I objected to Prof. Schuster calling it a "cheat sheet." Since he was allowing it, it's wasn't "cheating"!)
-I did okay. I posted a 32.5/40 (81%) on the midterm. I'm embarrassed by my performance on the final. It looked easy, and I left the examination room an hour early after providing an answer to all the questions, only to realize a couple hours later that I had completely botched a compactness proof. Between that gaffe, the midterm, and my homework grades, I was expecting to end up with a B+ in the course. (How mortifying—to have gone back to school almost specifically for this course and then _not even get an A_.) But when the grades came in, it ended up being an A: Prof. Schuster only knocked off 6 points for the bogus proof, for a final exam grade of 44/50 (88%), and had a policy of discarding the midterm grade when the final exam grade was higher. It still seemed to me that that should have probably worked out to an A− rather than an A, but it wasn't my job to worry about that.
+I did okay. I posted [a 32.5/40 (81%) on the midterm](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/real_analysis_ii-midterm.pdf). I'm embarrassed by my performance on [the final](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/real_analysis_ii-final.pdf). It looked easy, and I left the examination room an hour early after providing an answer to all the questions, only to realize a couple hours later that I had completely botched a compactness proof. Between that gaffe, the midterm, and my homework grades, I was expecting to end up with a B+ in the course. (How mortifying—to have gone back to school almost specifically for this course and then _not even get an A_.) But when the grades came in, it ended up being an A: Prof. Schuster only knocked off 6 points for the bogus proof, for a final exam grade of 44/50 (88%), and had a policy of discarding the midterm grade when the final exam grade was higher. It still seemed to me that that should have probably worked out to an A− rather than an A, but it wasn't my job to worry about that.
-#### "Probability Models" (Fall 2024)
+### "Probability Models" (Fall 2024)
-In addition to the rarified math-math of analysis, the practical math of probability seemed like a good choice for making the most of my elective credits at the university, so I also enrolled in Prof. Anandamayee Mujamdar's "Probability Models" for the Fall 2024 semester. The prerequisites were linear algebra, "Probability and Statistics I", and "Calculus III", but the registration webapp hadn't allowed me to enroll, presumably because it didn't believe I knew linear algebra. (The linear algebra requirement at SFSU was four units. My 2007 linear algebra class from UCSC, which was on a quarter system, got translated to 3.3 semester units.) Prof. Mujamdar hadn't replied to my July email requesting a permission code, but got me the code after telling me to send a followup email after I inquired in person at the end of the first class.
+In addition to the rarified math-math of analysis, the practical math of probability seemed like a good choice for making the most of my elective credits at the university, so I also enrolled in Prof. Anandamayee Mujamdar's "Probability Models" for the Fall 2024 semester. The prerequisites were linear algebra, "Probability and Statistics I", and "Calculus III", but the registration webapp hadn't allowed me to enroll, presumably because it didn't believe I knew linear algebra. (The linear algebra requirement at SFSU was four units. My 2007 linear algebra class from UC Santa Cruz, which was on a quarter system, got translated to 3.3 semester units.) Prof. Mujamdar hadn't replied to my July email requesting a permission code, but got me the code after telling me to send a followup email after I inquired in person at the end of the first class.
-(I had also considered taking the online-only "Introduction to Linear Models", which had the same prerequisites, but Prof. Kafai also hadn't replied to my July email, and I didn't bother following up, which was just as well: the semester ended up feeling busy enough with just the real analysis, probability models, my gen-ed puff course, and maintaining my soul in an environment that assumes people need a bureaucratic control structure in order to keep busy.)
+(I had also considered taking the online-only "Introduction to Linear Models", which had the same prerequisites, but Prof. Mohammad Kafai also hadn't replied to my July email, and I didn't bother following up, which was just as well: the semester ended up feeling busy enough with just the real analysis, probability models, my gen-ed puff course, and maintaining my soul in an environment that assumes people need a bureaucratic control structure in order to keep busy.)
Like "Real II", "Probability Models" was also administratively cross-listed as both a graduate ("MATH 742", "Advanced Probability Models") and upper-division undergraduate course ("MATH 442"), despite no difference whatsoever in the work required of graduate and undergraduate students. After some weeks of reviewing the basics of random variables and conditional expectation, the course covered Markov chains and the Poisson process.
I continued my practice of using LLMs for hints when I got stuck on assignments, and citing the help in my writeup; Prof. Mujamdar seemed OK with it when I mentioned it at office hours. (I went to office hours occasionally, when I had a question for Prof. Mujamdar, who was kind and friendly to me, but it wasn't a social occasion like Prof. Schuster's conference-room office hours.)
-I was apparently more conscientious than most students. Outside of class, the grad student who graded our assignments recommended that I make use of the text's solutions manual (which was circulating in various places online) to check my work. Apparently, he had reason to suspect that some other students in the class were just copying from the solution manual, but was not given the authority to prosecute the matter when he raised the issue to the professor. He said that felt bad marking me down for my mistakes when it was clear that I was trying to do the work.
+I was apparently more conscientious than most students. Outside of class, the grad student who graded our assignments recommended that I make use of the text's solutions manual (which was circulating in various places online) to check my work. Apparently, he had reason to suspect that some other students in the class were just copying from the solution manual, but was not given the authority to prosecute the matter when he raised the issue to the professor. He said that he felt bad marking me down for my mistakes when it was clear that I was trying to do the work.
The student quality seemed noticeably worse than "Real II", at least along the dimensions that I was sensitive to. There was a memorable moment when Prof. Mujamdar asked which students were in undergrad. I raised my hand. "Really?" she said.
I can only speculate that the occurrence of a student pointing out something about mathematical reality that wasn't on the test or syllabus was so unexpected, so beyond what everyone had been conditioned to think school was about, that no one had any context to make sense of it. A graduate statistics class at San Francisco State University just wasn't that kind of space. I did get an A.
-#### The 85th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition
+### The 85th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition
I also organized a team for the Putnam Competition, SFSU's first in institutional memory. (I'm really proud of [my recruitment advertisements](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2025/01/recruitment-advertisements-for-the-2024-putnam-competition-at-san-francisco-state-university/) to the math majors' mailing list.) The story of the Putnam effort has been recounted in a separate post, ["The End of the Movie: SF State's 2024 Putnam Competition Team, A Retrospective"](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2025/01/the-end-of-the-movie-sf-state-2024-putnam-competition-team-a-retrospective/).
-As the email headers at the top of the post indicate, the post was originally composed for the department mailing lists, but it never actually got published there: department chair Eric Hsu wrote to me that it was "much too long to send directly to the whole department" but asked for my "permission to eventually share it with the department, either as a link or possibly as a department web page." (He cc'd a department office admin whom I had spoken to about posting the Putnam training session announcements on the mailing list; reading between the lines, I'm imagining that she was discomfited by the tone of the post and appealed to Prof. Hsu's authority about whether to let it through.)
+As the email headers at the top of the post indicate, the post was originally composed for the department mailing lists, but it never actually got published there: department chair Eric Hsu wrote to me that it was "much too long to send directly to the whole department" but asked for my "permission to eventually share it with the department, either as a link or possibly as a department web page." (He cc'd a department office admin whom I had spoken to about posting the Putnam training session announcements on the mailing list; reading between the lines, I'm imagining that she was discomfited by the tone of the post and had appealed to Chair Hsu's authority about whether to let it through.)
I assumed that the ask to share with the department "eventually" was polite bullshit on Hsu's part to let me down gently. (Probably no one gets to be department chair without being molded into a master of polite bullshit.) Privately, I didn't think the rationale made sense—it's just as easy to delete a long unwanted mailing list message as a short one; the email server wasn't going to run out of _paper_—but it seemed petty to argue. I replied that I hadn't known the rules for the mailing list and that he should feel free to share or not as he saw fit.
-#### "Measure and Integration" (Spring 2025)
+### "Measure and Integration" (Spring 2025)
I had a busy semester planned for Spring 2025, with two graduate-level (true graduate-level, not cross-listed) analysis courses plus three gen-ed courses that I needed to graduate. (Following Prof. Schuster, I'm humorously counting "Modern Algebra I" as a gen-ed course.) I only needed one upper-division undergrad math course other than "Modern Algebra I" to graduate, but while I was at the University for one more semester, I was intent on getting my money's worth. I aspired to get a head start (ideally on all three math courses) over winter break and checked out a complex analysis book with exercise solutions from the library, but only ended up getting any traction on measure theory, doing some exercises from chapter 14 of Schröder, "Integration on Measure Spaces".
Measure theory was a test of faith which I'm not sure I passed. Everyone who reads _Wikipedia_ knows about the notorious axiom of choice. This was the part of the school curriculum in which the axiom of choice becomes relevant. It impressed upon me that as much as I like analysis as an intellectual activity, I ... don't necessarily believe in this stuff? We go to all this work to define sigma-algebras in order to rule out pathological sets whose elements _cannot be written down because they're defined using the axiom of choice_. You could argue that it's not worse than uncountable sets, and that alternatives to classical mathematics just end up needing to bite different bullets. (In computable analysis, equality turns out to be uncomputable, because there's no limit on how many decimal places you would need to check for a tiny difference between two almost-equal numbers. For related reasons, all computable functions are continuous.) But I'm not necessarily happy about the situation.
-I did okay. I was late on some of the assignments (and didn't entirely finish [assignments #9](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-measure_and_integration-assignment09-attempt1.pdf) and [#10](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-measure_and_integration-assignment10-attempt1.pdf)), but the TA was late in grading them, too. I posted a 31/40 (77.5%) on the midterm. I was expecting to get around 80% on the final based on my previous performance on Prof. Schuster's examinations, but I ended up posting a 48/50 (96%), locking in an A for the course.
+I did okay. I was late on some of the assignments (and didn't entirely finish [assignments #9](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-measure_and_integration-assignment09-attempt1.pdf) and [#10](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-measure_and_integration-assignment10-attempt1.pdf)), but the TA was late in grading them, too. I posted [a 31/40 (77.5%) on the midterm](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/measure_and_integration-midterm.pdf). I was expecting to get around 80% on the final based on my previous performance on Prof. Schuster's examinations, but I [ended up posting a 48/50 (96%)](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/measure_and_integration-final.pdf), locking in an A for the course.
-#### "Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable" (Spring 2025)
+### "Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable" (Spring 2025)
My other graduate course was "Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable" ("MATH 730"), taught by Prof. Chun-Kit Lai. I loved the pretentious title and pronounced all seven words at every opportunity. (Everyone else, including Prof. Lai's syllabus, said "complex analysis" when they didn't say "730".)
The textbook was _Complex Analysis_ by Elias M. Stein and Rami Shakarchi, volume II in their "Princeton Lectures in Analysis" series. Stein and Shakarchi leave a lot to the reader (prototypically a Princeton student). It wasn't to my taste—but this time, I knew the problem was on my end. My distaste for Wade and Ross had been a reflection of the ways in which I was spiritually superior to the generic SFSU student; my distaste for Stein and Shakarchi reflected the grim reality that I was right where I belonged.
-I don't think I was alone in finding the work difficult. Prof. Lai gave the entire class an extension to rebsubmit assignment #2 because the average performance had been so poor.
+I don't think I was alone in finding the work difficult. Prof. Lai gave the entire class an extension to rebsubmit [assignment #2](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-theory_of_functions_of_a_complex_variable-assignment02-revised.pdf) because the average performance had been so poor.
Prof. Lai didn't object to my LLM hint usage policy when I inquired about it at office hours. I still felt bad about how much external help I needed just to get through the assignments. The fact that I footnoted everything meant that I wasn't being dishonest. (In his feedback on [my assignment #7](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-theory_of_functions_of_a_complex_variable-assignment07.pdf), Prof. Lai wrote to me, "I like your footnote. Very genuine and is a modern way of learning math.") It still felt humiliating to turn in [work with _so many_ footnotes](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-theory_of_functions_of_a_complex_variable-assignment06.pdf): "Thanks to OpenAI o3-mini-high for hints", "Thanks to Claude Sonnet 3.7 for guidance", "Thanks to [classmate's name] for this insight", "Thanks to the "Harmonic Conjugate" _Wikipedia_ article", "This is pointed out in Tristan Needham's _Visual Complex Analysis_, p. [...]", _&c._
I guess that's okay because grades aren't real, but the work was real. If Prof. Lai had faced a dilemma between watering down either the grading scale or the course content in order to accomodate SFSU students being retarded, I'm glad he chose to preserve the integrity of the content.
-#### "Modern Algebra I" (Spring 2025)
+### "Modern Algebra I" (Spring 2025)
One of the quirks of being an autodidact is that it's easy to end up with an "unbalanced" skill profile relative to what school authorities expect. As a student of mathematics, I consider myself more of an analyst than an algebraist and had not previously prioritized learning abstract algebra nor (what the school authorities cared about) "taking" an algebra "class", neither the previous semester nor in Fall 2012/Spring 2013. (Over the years, I had taken a few [desultory swings at Dummit & Foote](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/group-theory-for-wellness-i/), but had never gotten very far.) I thus found myself in Prof. Dusty Ross's "Modern Algebra I" ("MATH 335"), the last "core" course I needed to graduate.
I mostly treated the algebra coursework as an afterthought to the analysis courses I was devoting most of my focus to. I tried to maintain a lead on the weekly algebra assignments (five problems hand-picked by Prof. Ross, not from Gallian), submitting them an average of 5.9 days early—in the spirit of getting it out of the way. [On](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-algebra-assignment02.pdf) [a](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-algebra-assignment05.pdf) [few](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-algebra-assignment07.pdf) [assignments](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-algebra-assignment07.pdf), I wrote some Python to compute orders of elements or cosets of permutation groups in preference to doing it by hand. One week [I started working on the prequisite chapter on polynomial rings](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/polynomial_rings_1.pdf) from the algebraic geometry book Prof. Ross had just written with his partner Prof. Emily Clader, but that was just to show off to Prof. Ross at office hours that I had at least looked at his book; I didn't stick with it.
-The Tutoring and Academic Support Center (TASC) offered tutoring for "Modern Algebra I", so I signed up for weekly tutoring sessions with the TA for the class, not because I needed help to do well in the class, but it was nice to work with someone. Sometimes I did the homework, sometimes we talked about some other algebra topic (from Dummit & Foote, or Ross & Clader that one week), one week I tried to explain my struggles with measure theory. TASC gave out loyalty program–style punch cards that bribed students with a choice of between two prizes every three tutoring sessions, which is as patronizing as it sounds, but wondering what the next prize options would be provided a source of anticipation and mystery; I got a pen and a button and a tote bag over the course of the semester.
+The Tutoring and Academic Support Center (TASC) offered tutoring for "Modern Algebra I", so I signed up for weekly tutoring sessions with the TA for the class, not because I needed help to do well in the class, but it was nice to work with someone. Sometimes I did the homework, sometimes we talked about some other algebra topic (from Dummit & Foote, or Ross & Clader that one week), one week I tried to explain my struggles with measure theory. TASC gave out loyalty program–style punch cards that bribed students with a choice between two prizes every three tutoring sessions, which is as patronizing as it sounds, but wondering what the next prize options would be was a source of anticipation and mystery; I got a pen and a button and a tote bag over the course of the semester.
+
+
I posted a somewhat disappointing 79/90 (87.8%) on the final, mostly due to stupid mistakes or laziness on my part; I hadn't prepped that much. Wracking my brain during a "Give an example of each the [_sic_] following" question on the exam, I was proud to have come up with the quaternions and "even-integer quaternions" as examples of noncommutative rings with and without unity, respectively.
He didn't give me credit for those. We hadn't covered the quaternions in class.
-### Not Sweating the Fake Stuff (Non-Math)
+## Not Sweating the Fake Stuff (Non-Math)
In addition to the gen-ed requirements that could be satisfied with transfer credits, there were also upper-division gen-ed requirements that had to be taken at SFSU: one class each from "UD-B: Physical and/or Life Sciences" (which I had satisfied with [a ridiculous "Contemporary Sexuality" class in Summer 2012](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/08/contemporary/)), "UD-C: Arts and/or Humanities", and "UD-D: Social Sciences". There was also an "Area E: Lifelong Learning and Self-Development" requirement, and four "SF State Studies" requirements (which overlapped with the UD- classes).
-#### "Queer Literatures and Media" (Fall 2024)
+### "Queer Literatures and Media" (Fall 2024)
I try to keep it separate from my wholesome math and philosophy blogging, but at this point [it's not a secret that](http://unremediatedgender.space/2023/Jul/i-am-dropping-the-pseudonym-from-this-blog/) I have a sideline in gender-politics blogging. As soon as I saw the title in the schedule of classes, it was clear that if I had to sit through another gen-ed class, "Queer Literatures and Media" was the obvious choice. I thought I might be able to reuse some of my coursework for the blog, or if nothing else, get an opportunity to troll the professor.
I inquired about Prof. Goldberg's office hours, which turned out to be directly before and after class, which conflicted with my other classes. (I gathered that Prof. Goldberg was commuting to SF State specifically to teach this class in an adjunct capacity; she more commonly taught at [City College of San Francisco](https://www.ccsf.edu/).) I ditched "Probability Models" lecture one day, just to talk with her about my whole deal. (She didn't seem to approve of me ditching another class when I mentioned that detail.)
-It went surprisingly well. Prof. Goldberg is a butch lesbian who, crucially, was old enough to remember the before-time prior to the hegemony of gender identity ideology, and seemed sympathetic to gentle skepticism of some of the newer ideas. She could grant that trans women's womanhood was different from that of cis women, and criticized the way activists tend to glamorizes suicide, in contrast to promoting narratives of queer resilience.
+It went surprisingly well. Prof. Goldberg is a butch lesbian who, crucially, was old enough to remember the before-time prior to the hegemony of gender identity ideology, and seemed sympathetic to gentle skepticism of some of the newer ideas. She could grant that trans women's womanhood was different from that of cis women, and criticized the way activists tend to glamorize suicide, in contrast to promoting narratives of queer resilience.
When I mentioned my specialization, she remarked that she had never had a math major among her students. Privately, I doubted whether that was really true. (I couldn't have been the only one who needed the gen-ed credits.) But I found it striking for the lack of intellectual ambition it implied within the discipline. I unironically think you do need some math in order to do gender studies correctly—not a lot, just enough linear-algebraic and statistical intuition to ground the idea of categories as clusters in high-dimensional space. I can't imagine resigning myself to such smallness, consigning such a vast and foundational area of knowledge to be someone else's problem—or when I do (_e.g._, I can't say I know any chemistry), I feel sad about it.
During the final presentations, I noticed that a lot of students were slavishly mentioning the assignment requirements in the presentation itself: the rubric had said to cite two readings, two media selections, _&c_. from the course, and people were explicitly saying, "For my two course readings, I choose ..." When I pointed out to the Prof. Goldberg that this isn't how anyone does scholarship when they have something to say (you cite sources in order to support your thesis; you don't say "the two works I'm citing are ..."), she said that we could talk about methodology later, but that the assignment was what it was.
-For my project, I ignored the presentation instructions entirely and just spent the two days after the Putnam exam banging out [a paper titled "Virginia Prince and the Hazards of Noticing"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/virginia_prince_and_the_hazards.pdf) (four pages with copious footnotes, mostly self-citing my gender-politics blog, in LyX with a couple of mathematical expressions in the appendix, for tradition's sake). For my presentation, I just had my paper on the screen in lieu of slides and talked until Prof. Goldberg said I was out of time (halfway through the second page).
+For my project, I ignored the presentation instructions entirely and just spent the two days after the Putnam exam banging out [a paper titled "Virginia Prince and the Hazards of Noticing"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/virginia_prince_and_the_hazards.pdf) (four pages with copious footnotes, mostly self-citing my gender-politics blog, in LyX with a couple of mathematical expressions in the appendix—a tradition from my community college days). For my presentation, I just had my paper on the screen in lieu of slides and talked until Prof. Goldberg said I was out of time (halfway through the second page).
I didn't think it was high-quality enough to republish on the blog.
Between the assignments I had skipped and my blatant disregard of the final presentation instructions, I ended up getting a C− in the class, which is perhaps the funniest possible outcome.
-#### "Philosophy of Animals" (Spring 2025)
+### "Philosophy of Animals" (Spring 2025)
I was pleased that the charmingly-titled "Philosophy of Animals" fit right into my Tuesday–Thursday schedule after measure theory and the theory of functions of a complex variable. It would satisfy the "UD-B: Physical/Life Science" and "SF State Studies: Environmental Sustainability" gen-ed requirements.
-Before the semester, the Prof. Kimbrough Moore sent out an introductory email asking us to consider as a discussion question for our first session whether it is is some sense contradictory for a vegetarian to eat oysters. I wrote a 630 word email in response (Subject: "ostroveganism vs. Schelling points (was: "Phil 392 - Welcome")") arguing that there are game-theoretic reasons for animal welfare advocates to commit to vegetarianism or veganism despite a _prima facie_ case that oysters don't suffer—with a postscript asking if referring to courses by number was common in the philosophy department.
+Before the semester, the Prof. Kimbrough Moore sent out an introductory email asking us to consider as a discussion question for our first session whether it is some sense contradictory for a vegetarian to eat oysters. I wrote a 630 word email in response (Subject: "ostroveganism vs. Schelling points (was: "Phil 392 - Welcome")") arguing that there are game-theoretic reasons for animal welfare advocates to commit to vegetarianism or veganism despite a _prima facie_ case that oysters don't suffer—with a postscript asking if referring to courses by number was common in the philosophy department.
The course, and Prof. Moore himself, were pretty relaxed. There were readings on animal consciousness and rights from the big names (Singer on "All Animals are Equal", Nagel on "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?") and small ones, and then some readings about AI at the end of course.
Prof. Moore was reasonably competent at his job; I just had trouble seeing why his job, or for that matter, the SFSU philosophy department, should exist.
-In one class session, he mentioned offhand (in a slight digression from the philosophy of animals) that there are different types of infinity. By way of explaining, he pointed out that there's no "next" decimal after 0.2 the way that there's a next integer after 2. I called out that that wasn't the argument. (The rationals are countable.) The same lecture, he explained Occam's razor in a way that I found rather superficial. (I think you need Kolmogorov complexity or the [minimum description length](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) principle to do the topic justice.) That night, I sent him an email explaining the countability of the rationals and recommending a pictoral intuition pump for Occam's razor due to David MacKay (Subject: "countability; and, a box behind a tree").
+In one class session, he mentioned offhand (in a slight digression from the philosophy of animals) that there are different types of infinity. By way of explaining, he pointed out that there's no "next" decimal after 0.2 the way that there's a next integer after 2. I called out that that wasn't the argument. (The rationals are countable.) The same lecture, he explained Occam's razor in a way that I found rather superficial. (I think you need Kolmogorov complexity or the [minimum description length](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) principle to do the topic justice.) That night, I sent him an email explaining the countability of the rationals and recommending [a pictoral intuition pump for Occam's razor due to David MacKay](https://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itprnn/ps/343.355.pdf) (Subject: "countability; and, a box behind a tree").
In April, the usual leftist blob on campus had scheduled a "Defend Higher Education" demonstration to protest proposed budget cuts to the California State University system; Prof. Moore offered one point of extra credit in "Philosophy of Animals" for participating.
It was fine. Prof. Moore "clarified" that the extra credit was viewpoint-neutral. (I was a little embarrassed not to have witnessed the verbal announcement in class on Tuesday, but I had already made plans to [interview the campus machine-shop guy](https://www.peterverdone.com/academia-math-trans-and-a-ton-of-other-stuff/) at that time instead of coming to class.) After having made a fuss, I was obligated to follow through, so I made a "BUDGET CUTS ARE PROBABLY OK!" sign (re-using the other side of the foamboard from [an anti–designated hitter rule sign I had made for a recent National League baseball game](https://x.com/zackmdavis/status/1806179824249225321)) and held it at the rally on Thursday for ten minutes to earn the extra-credit point.
-As for the philosophy of animals itself, I was already sufficiently well-versed in naturalist philosophy of mind that I don't feel like I learned much of anything new. I posted 24/25 (plus a 2 point "curve" because SFSU students are illiterate), 21.5/25 (plus 4), and 22/25 (plus 2) on the three tests, and finished the semester at 101.5% for an A.
+
+
+As for the philosophy of animals itself, I was already sufficiently well-versed in naturalist philosophy of mind that I don't feel like I learned much of anything new. I posted [24/25](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/philosophy_of_animals-test1.pdf) (plus a 2 point "curve" because SFSU students are illiterate), [21.5/25](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/philosophy_of_animals-test2.pdf) (plus 4), and 22/25 (plus 2) on the three tests, and finished the semester at 101.5% for an A.
-#### "Self, Place, and Knowing: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Inquiry" (Spring 2025)
+### "Self, Place, and Knowing: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Inquiry" (Spring 2025)
I was able to satisfy the "Area E: Lifelong Learning and Self-Development" gen-ed requirement with an asynchronous online-only class, Prof. Mariana Ferreira's "Self, Place, and Knowing: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Inquiry". Whatever expectations I had of a lower-division social studies gen-ed class at San Francisco State University, this felt like a parody of that.
The first few weekly assignments were quizzes on given readings. This already annoyed me: in a synchronous in-person class, a "quiz" is typically closed-book unless otherwise specified. The purpose is to verify that the student did the reading. It would be a perversion of that purpose for the quiz-taker to read the question, and then Ctrl-F in the PDF to find the answer without reading the full text, but there was no provision for stopping that eventuality here.
-The first quiz was incredibly poorly written: some of the answers were obvious just from looking at the multiple choice options, and some of them depended on minutiae of the text that a typical reader couldn't reasonably be expected to memorize. (The article quoted several academics in passing, and then the quiz had a question of the form "[name] at [university] expresses concerns about:".) I took it closed-book and got 7/10.
+The first quiz was incredibly poorly written: some of the answers were obvious just from looking at the multiple choice options, and some of them depended on minutiæ of the text that a typical reader couldn't reasonably be expected to memorize. (The article quoted several academics in passing, and then the quiz had a question of the form "[name] at [university] expresses concerns about:".) I took it closed-book and got 7/10.
I posted a question on the class forum asking for clarification on the closed-book issue, and gently complaining about the terrible questions (Subject: "Are the quizzes supposed to be 'open book'? And, question design"). No one replied; I was hoping Prof. Ferreira kept an eye on the forum. I could have inquired with her more directly, but the syllabus said Zoom office hours were by appointment only at 8 _a.m._ Tuesdays—just when I was supposed to be out the door to be on time for "Measure and Integration." I didn't bother.
> I have to say, there's something striking about your writing style in this post, and even more so your comments of Ms. Williams's and Ms. Mcsorley's posts. The way you summarize and praise your classmates' ideas has a certain _personality_ to it—somehow I imagine the voice of a humble manservant with a Nigeran accent (betraying no feelings of his own) employed by a technology company, perhaps one headquartered on 18th Street in our very city. You simply must tell us where you learned to write like that!
-I felt a little bit nervous about that afterwards: my conscious intent with the "Nigerian manservant" simile was to allude to the story about ChatGPT's affinity for the word _delve_ being traceable to the word's prevalence among the English-speaking Nigerians that OpenAI employed as data labelers, but given the cultural milieu of an SFSU social studies class, I worried that it would be called out as racist. (And whatever my conscious intent, maybe at some level I was asking for it.)
+I felt a little bit nervous about that afterwards: my conscious intent with the "Nigerian manservant" simile was to allude to [the story about ChatGPT's affinity for the word _delve_ being traceable to the word's prevalence among the English-speaking Nigerians](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape-ai-gadgest-humane-ai-pin-chatgpt) that OpenAI employed as data labelers, but given the cultural milieu of an SFSU social studies class, I worried that it would be called out as racist. (And whatever my conscious intent, maybe at some level I was asking for it.)
I definitely shouldn't have worried. Other than the fact that Prof. Ferreira gave me credit for the assignment, I have no evidence that any human read what I wrote.
My final paper was an exercise in bullshit and malicious compliance: over the course of an afternoon and evening (and finishing up the next morning), I rambled until I hit the wordcount requirement, [titling the result, "How Do Housing Supply and Community Assets Affect Rents and Quality of Life in Census Tract 3240.03? An Critical Microeconomic Synthesis of Self, Place, and Knowing"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-ls200-final_paper.pdf). My contempt for the exercise would have been quite apparent to anyone who read my work, but Prof. Ferreira predictably either didn't read it or didn't care. I got my A, and my Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics (Mathematics for Liberal Arts) _cum laude_.
-### Cynicism and Sanity
+## Cynicism and Sanity
The satisfaction of finally finishing after all these years was tinged with grief. Despite the manifest justice of my complaints about school, it really hadn't been that terrible—this time. The math was real, and I suppose it makes sense for some sort of institution to vouch for people knowing math, rather than having to take people's word for it.
-So why didn't I do this when I was young, the first time, at Santa Cruz? I could have majored in math, even if I'm actually a philosopher. I could have taken the Putnam (which is just offered at UCSC without a student needing to step up to organize). I could have gotten my career started in 2010. It wouldn't have been hard—that is, it wouldn't have been cognitively hard, the way that the theory of functions of a complex variable is hard.
+So why didn't I do this when I was young, the first time, at Santa Cruz? I could have majored in math, even if I'm actually a philosopher. I could have taken the Putnam (which is [just offered at UCSC](https://people.ucsc.edu/~pmorale5/putnam/putnam.html) without a student needing to step up to organize). I could have gotten my career started in 2010. It wouldn't have been hard except insofar as it would have involved wholesome hard things, like the theory of functions of a complex variable.
What is a tragedy rather than an excuse is, I hadn't known how, at the time. The official story is that the Authority of school is necessary to prepare students for "the real world". But the thing that made it bearable and even worthwhile this time is that I had enough life experience to treat school as part of the real world that I could interact with on my own terms, and not any kind of Authority. The incomplete contract was an annoyance, not a torturous contradiction in the fabric of reality.
I ended up getting waivers from Chair Hsu for some of my UCSC credits that the computer system hadn't recognized as fulfilling the degree requirements. I told myself that I didn't need to neurotically ask followup questions about whether it was "really" okay that (_e.g._) my converted 3.3 units of linear algebra were being accepted for a 4-unit requirement. It was Chair Hsu's job to make his own judgement call as to whether it was okay. I would have been agreeable to take a test to prove that I know linear algebra—but realistically, why would Hsu bother to have someone administer a test rather than just accept the UCSC credits? It was fine; I was fine.
+I remember that back in 2012, when I was applying to both SF State and UC Berkeley as a transfer student from community college, the application forms had said to list grades from all college courses attempted, and I wasn't sure whether that should be construed to include whatever I could remember about the courses from a very brief stint at Heald College in 2008, which I didn't have a transcript for because I had quit before finishing a single semester without receiving any grades. (Presumably, the intent of the instruction on the forms was to prevent people from trying to elide courses they did poorly in at the institution they were transferring from, which would be discovered anyway when it came time to transfer credits. Arguably, the fact that I had briefly tried Heald and didn't like it wasn't relevant to my application on the strength of my complete DVC and UCSC grades.)
+
+As I recall, I ended up listing the incomplete Heald courses on my UC Berkeley application (out of an abundance of moral caution, because Berkeley was actually competitive), but not my SFSU application. (The ultimate outcome of being rejected from Berkeley and accepted to SFSU would have almost certainly been the same regardless.) Was I following morally coherent reasoning? I don't know. Maybe I should have phoned up the respective admissions offices at the time to get clarification from a human. But the possibility that I might have arguably filled out a form incorrectly thirteen years ago isn't something that should turn the entire endeavor into ash. The possibility that I might have been admitted _to SFSU_ on such "false pretenses" is not something that any actual human cares about. (And if someone does, at least I'm telling the world about it in this blog post, to help them take appropriate action.) It's fine; I'm fine.
+
When Prof. Mujamdar asked us to bring our laptops for the recitation on importance sampling and I didn't feel like lugging my laptop on BART, I just did the work at home—in Rust—and verbally collaborated with a classmate during the recitation session. I didn't ask for permission to not bring the laptop, or to use Rust. It was fine; I was fine.
In November 2024, I had arranged to meet with Prof. Arek Goetz "slightly before midday" regarding the rapidly approaching registration deadline for the Putnam competition. I ducked out of "Real II" early and knocked on his office door at 11:50 _a.m._, then waited until 12:20 before sending him an email on my phone and proceeding to my 12:30 "Queer Literatures and Media" class. While surreptitiously checking my phone during class, I saw that at 12:38 _p.m._, he emailed me, "Hello Zack, I am in the office, not sure if you stopped by yet...". I raised my hand, made a contribution to the class discussion when Prof. Goldberg called on me (offering _Seinfeld_'s "not that there's anything wrong with that" episode as an example of homophobia in television), then grabbed my bag and slipped out while she had her back turned to the whiteboard. Syncing up with Prof. Goetz about the Putnam registration didn't take long. When I got back to "Queer Literatures and Media", the class had split up into small discussion groups; I joined someone's group. Prof. Goldberg acknowledged my return with a glance and didn't seem annoyed.
In contrast to my negligence in "Queer Literatures and Media", I mostly did the reading for "Philosophy of Animals"—but only mostly. It wasn't important to notice or track if I missed an article or skimmed a few pages here and there (in addition to my thing of cutting class in favor of Prof. Schuster's office hours half the time). I engaged with the material enough to answer the written exam questions, and that was the only thing anyone was measuring. It was fine; I was fine.
-I was fine now, but I hadn't been fine at Santa Cruz in 2007. The contrast in mindset is instructive. Recall that the precipitating event of my whole anti-school crusade had been the hysterical complete mental breakdown I had after finding myself unable to meet pagecount on a paper for "Introduction to Feminisms".
+I was fine now, but I hadn't been fine at Santa Cruz in 2007. The contrast in mindset is instructive. The precipitating event of my whole anti-school crusade had been the hysterical complete mental breakdown I had after finding myself unable to meet pagecount on a paper for Prof. Bettina Aptheker's famous "Introduction to Feminisms" course.
It seems so insane in retrospect. As I demonstrated with my malicious compliance for "Self, Place, and Knowing", writing a paper that will receive a decent grade in an undergraduate social studies class is just not cognitively difficult (even if Prof. Aptheker and the UCSC of 2007 probably had higher standards than Prof. Ferreira and the SFSU of 2025). I could have done it—if I had been cynical enough to bullshit for the sake of the assignment, rather than holding myself to the standard of writing something I believed and having a complete mental breakdown rather than confront the fact that I apparently didn't believe what I was being taught in "Introduction to Feminisms."
-I don't want to condemn my younger self entirely, because the trait that made me so insanely dysfunctional was a form of integrity. I was right to want to write something I believed. It would be wrong to give up my soul to the kind of cynicism that scorns ideals themselves, rather than the kind than scorns people and institutions for not living up to the ideals and lying about it.
+I don't want to condemn my younger self entirely, because the trait that made me so dysfunctional was a form of integrity. I was right to want to write something I believed. It would be wrong to give up my soul to the kind of cynicism that scorns ideals themselves, rather than the kind than scorns people and institutions for not living up to the ideals and lying about it.
Even so, it would have been better for everyone if I had either bullshitted to meet the pagecount, or just turned in a too-short paper without having a total mental breakdown about it. The total mental breakdown didn't help anyone! It was bad for me, and it imposed costs on everyone around me.
There's also a sense of grief and impermanence about only having my serious-university-math experience in the GPT-4 era rather than getting to experience it in the before-time while it lasted. If I didn't have LLM tutors, I would have had to be more aggressive about collaborating with peers and asking followup questions in office hours.
-My grudging admission that the degree means something to me should not be construed as support for credentialism. Neural net interpretability pioneer Chris Olah never got his Bachelor's degree, and anyone who thinks less of him because of that is telling on themselves.
+My grudging admission that the degree means something to me should not be construed as support for credentialism. Chris Olah never got his Bachelor's degree, and anyone who thinks less of him because of that is telling on themselves.
At the same time, I'm not Chris Olah. For those of us without access to the feedback loops entailed by a research position at Google Brain, there's a benefit to being calibrated about the standard way things are done. (Which, I hasten to note, I could in principle have gotten from MIT OpenCourseWare; my accounting of benefits from happening to finish college is not an admission that the credentialists were right.) Obviously, I knew that math is not a spectator sport: in the years that I was filling my pages of notes from my own textbooks, I was attempting exercises and not just reading (because just reading doesn't work). But was I doing _enough_ exercises, correctly, to the standard that would be demanded in a school class, before moving on to the next shiny topic? It's not worth the effort to do an exhaustive audit of my 2008–2024 private work, but I think in many cases, I was not. Having a better sense of what the mainstream standard is will help me adjust my self-study practices going forward.
-When I informally audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley in 2017, Prof. Charles C. Pugh agreed to grade my midterm, and I got a 56/100. I don't know what the class's distribution was. Having been given to understand that many STEM courses offered a generous curve, I would later describe it as me ["[doing] fine on the midterm"](/2024/Mar/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/#it-matters-whether-peoples-beliefs-about-themselves-are-actually-true). Looking at the exam paper after having been through even SFSU's idea of an analysis course, I think I was expecting too little of myself: by all rights, a serious analysis student in exam shape _should_ be able to prove that the minimum distance between a compact and a connected set is achieved by some pair of points in the sets, or the product of connected spaces is connected (as opposed to merely writing down relevant observations that fell short of a proof, as I did).
+When I informally audited "Honors Introduction to Analysis" ("MATH H104") at UC Berkeley in 2017, Prof. Charles C. Pugh agreed to grade [my midterm](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/2017-analysis_midterm.pdf), and I got a 56/100. I don't know what the class's distribution was. Having been given to understand that many STEM courses offered a generous curve, I would later describe it as me ["[doing] fine on the midterm"](http://archive.today/2024.04.14-030453/http://unremediatedgender.space/2024/Mar/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/#selection-1263.247-1263.337). Looking at the exam paper after having been through even SFSU's idea of an analysis course, I think I was expecting too little of myself: by all rights, a serious analysis student in exam shape _should_ be able to prove that the minimum distance between a compact and a closed set is achieved by some pair of points in the sets, or that the product of connected spaces is connected (as opposed to merely writing down relevant observations that fell short of a proof, as I did).
In a July 2011 Diary entry, yearning to finally be free of school, I fantasized about speedrunning SF State's "advanced studies" track in two semesters: "Six classes a semester sounds like a heavy load, but it won't be if I study some of the material in advance," I wrote. That seems delusional now. That's not actually true of real math classes, even if it were potentially true of "Self, Place, and Knowing"-tier bullshit classes.
There's a substantial component of chance in my coming to finish the degree. The idea presented itself to me in early 2024 while I was considering what to work on next after a writing project had reached a natural stopping point. People were discussing education and schooling on Twitter in a way that pained me, and it occurred to me that I would feel better about being able to criticize school from the position of "... and I have a math degree" rather than "... so I didn't finish." It seemed convenient enough, so I did it.
-But a key reason it seemed convenient enough is that I still happened to live within commuting distance of SF State. That may be more due to inertia than anything else; when I needed to change apartments in 2023, I had considered moving to Reno, NV, but ended up staying in the East Bay because it was less of a hassle. If I had fled to Reno, then transferring credits and finishing the degree on a whim at the University of Nevada–Reno would have been less convenient. I probably wouldn't have done it—and I think it was ultimately worth doing.
+But a key reason it seemed convenient enough is that I still happened to live within commuting distance of SF State. That may be more due to inertia than anything else; when I needed to change apartments in 2023, I had considered moving to Reno, NV, but [ended up staying in the East Bay](http://unremediatedgender.space/2023/Sep/start-over/) because it was less of a hassle. If I had fled to Reno, then transferring credits and finishing the degree on a whim at the University of Nevada–Reno would have been less convenient. I probably wouldn't have done it—and I think it was ultimately worth doing.
The fact that humans are such weak general intelligences that so much of our lives come down to happenstance, rather than people charting an optimal path for themselves, helps explain why there are institutions that shunt people down a standard track with a known distribution of results. I still don't like it, and I still think people should try to do better for themselves, but it seems somewhat less perverse now.
Afterwards, Prof. Schuster encouraged me via email to at least consider grad school, saying that I seemed comparable to his peers in the University of Michigan Ph.D. program (which was ranked #10 in the U.S. at that time in the late '90s). I demurred: I said I would consider it if circumstances were otherwise, but in contrast to the last two semesters to finish undergrad, grad school didn't pass a cost-benefit analysis.
-(Okay, I did end up [crashing Prof. Clader's "Advanced Topics in Mathematics: Algebraic Topology"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/algebraic_topology-01.pdf) ("MATH 790") the following semester, and she agreed to grade my examinations, on which I got
-
-But I didn't _enroll_.)
+(Okay, I did end up [crashing Prof. Clader's "Advanced Topics in Mathematics: Algebraic Topology"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/algebraic_topology-01.pdf) ("MATH 790") the following semester, and she agreed to grade my examinations, on which I got 47/50, 45/50, 46/50, and 31/50. But I didn't _enroll_.)
What was significant (but not appropriate to mention in the email) was that now the choice to pursue more schooling _was_ a matter of cost–benefit analysis, and not a prospect of torment or betrayal of the divine.
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff
