Office hours chatter didn't confine itself to math. Prof. Schuster sometimes wore a Free Palestine bracelet. I asked him what I should read to understand the pro-Palestinian position, which had been neglected in my Jewish upbringing. He recommended Rashid Kalidi's _The Hundred Years' War on Palestine_, which I read and found informative (in contrast to the student pro-Palestine demonstrators on campus, who I found anti-persuasive).
-I got along fine with the other students, but do not seem to have formed any lasting friendships. The culture of school didn't feel quite as bad as I remembered. It's unclear to me how much of this is due to my memory having stored a hostile caricature, and how much is due to my being less sensitive to it this time. When I was at SFSU a dozen years ago, I remember seething with hatred at how everyone talked about their studies in terms of classes and teachers and grades, rather than about the subject matter in itself. There was still a lot of that—bad enough that I complained about it at every opportunity—but I wasn't seething with hatred anymore, as if I had come to terms with it as mere dysfunction and not sacrilege. I only cried while complaining about it a couple times.
+I got along fine with the other students but do not seem to have formed any lasting friendships. The culture of school didn't feel quite as bad as I remembered. It's unclear to me how much of this is due to my memory having stored a hostile caricature, and how much is due to my being less sensitive to it this time. When I was at SFSU a dozen years ago, I remember seething with hatred at how everyone talked about their studies in terms of classes and teachers and grades, rather than about the subject matter in itself. There was still a lot of that—bad enough that I complained about it at every opportunity—but I wasn't seething with hatred anymore, as if I had come to terms with it as mere dysfunction and not sacrilege. I only cried while complaining about it a couple times.
One of my signature gripes was about the way people in the department habitually refered to courses by number rather than title, which felt [like something out of a dystopian YA novel](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouAreNumberSix). A course title like "Real Analysis II" at least communicates that the students are working on real analysis, even if the opaque "II" doesn't expose which real-analytic topics are covered. In contrast, a course number like "MATH 770" doesn't mean anything outside of SFSU's bureaucracy. It isn't how people would talk if they believed there was a subject matter worth knowing about except insofar as the customs of bureaucratic servitude demanded it.
If I were just trying to learn, the external help wouldn't have seemed like a moral issue. I look things up all the time when I'm working on something I care about, but the institutional context of submitting an assignment for a grade seemed to introduce the kind of moral ambiguity that had made school so unbearable to me, in a way that didn't feel fully mitigated by the transparent footnotes.
-I told myself not to worry about it. The purpose of the "assignment" was to help us to learn about the theory of functions of a complex variable, and I was doing that. Prof. Lai had said in class and in office hours that he trusted us, that he trusted me. If I had wanted to avoid this particular source of moral ambiguity at all costs, but still wanted a Bachelor's degree, I could have taken easier classes for which I wouldn't need so much external assistance. But that would be insane. The thing I was doing now, of jointly trying to maximize math knowledge while also participating in the standard system to help with that, made sense. Minimizing perceived moral ambiguity (which was all in my head) would have just been a really stupid goal. Now, so late in life at age 37, I wanted to give myself fully over to not being stupid, even unto the cost of perceived moral ambiguity which was all in my head.
+I told myself not to worry about it. The purpose of the "assignment" was to help us to learn about the theory of functions of a complex variable, and I was doing that. Prof. Lai had said in class and in office hours that he trusted us, that he trusted me. If I had wanted to avoid this particular source of moral ambiguity at all costs, but still wanted a Bachelor's degree, I could have taken easier classes for which I wouldn't need so much external assistance. (I didn't even need the credits from this class to graduate.)
-Prof. Lai eschewed in-person exams in favor of take-homes for both the midterm and the final. He said reasonable internet reference usage was allowed, as with the assignments. I didn't ask for further clarification, but resolved to myself that for the take-homes, I would allow myself static websites but obviously no LLMs. I had already neurotically asked for clarification about the policy for the assignments once more than was necessary. I wasn't a grade-grubber; I would give myself the authentic 2010s take-home exam experience and accept the outcome.
+But that would be insane. The thing I was doing now, of jointly trying to maximize math knowledge while also participating in the standard system to help with that, made sense. Minimizing perceived moral ambiguity (which was all in my head) would have been a really stupid goal. Now, so late in life at age 37, I wanted to give myself fully over to not being stupid, even unto the cost of perceived moral ambiguity which was all in my head.
-(I suspect Prof. Lai would have allowed LLMs on the midterm if I had asked—I didn't get the sense that he yet understood the edge that the latest models offered over mere books and websites. On 29 April, a friend told me that instructors will increasingly just assume students are cheating with LLMs anyway; anything that showed I put thought in would be refreshing. I said that for this particular class and professor, I thought I was a semester or two early for that. In fact, I was two weeks early: on 13 May, Prof. Lai remarked before class and in the conference room during Prof. Schuster's office hours that he had given a bunch of analysis problem to Gemini the previous night, and it got them all right.)
+Prof. Lai eschewed in-person exams in favor of take-homes for both the midterm and the final. He said reasonable internet reference usage was allowed, as with the assignments. I didn't ask for further clarification because I had already neurotically asked for clarification about the policy for the assignments once more than was necessary, but resolved to myself that for the take-homes, I would allow myself static websites but obviously no LLMs. I wasn't a grade-grubber; I would give myself the authentic 2010s take-home exam experience and accept the outcome.
+
+(I suspect Prof. Lai would have allowed LLMs on the midterm if I had asked—I didn't get the sense that he yet understood the edge that the latest models offered over mere books and websites. On 29 April, a friend told me that instructors will increasingly just assume students are cheating with LLMs anyway; anything that showed I put thought in would be refreshing. I said that for this particular class and professor, I thought I was a semester or two early for that. In fact, I was two weeks early: on 13 May, Prof. Lai remarked before class and in the conference room during Prof. Schuster's office hours that he had given a bunch of analysis problems to Gemini the previous night, and it got them all right.)
I got a 73 on the midterm. Even with the (static) internet, sometimes I would hit a spot where I got stuck and couldn't get unstuck in a reasonable amount of time.
-There were only 9 homework assignments during the semester (contrasted to 12 in "Measure and Integration") to give us time to work on an expository paper and presentation on one of either the Gamma function, the Reimann zeta function, the prime number theorem, or elliptic functions. I wrote four pages on "Pinpointing the Generalized Factorial", explaining the motivation of the Gamma function, except that I'm not fond of how the definition is shifted by one from what anyone would expect, so I wrote about the unshifted Pi function instead.
+There were only 9 homework assignments during the semester (contrasted to 12 in "Measure and Integration") to give us time to work on an expository paper and presentation on one of either the Gamma function, the Reimann zeta function, the prime number theorem, or elliptic functions. I wrote four pages on "Pinpointing the Generalized Factorial", explaining the motivation of the Gamma function, except that I'm not fond of how the definition is shifted by one from what you'd expect, so I wrote about the unshifted Pi function instead.
-I wish I had allocated more time to it. This was my one opportunity in my institutionalized math career to "write a paper" and not merely "complete an assignment"; it would have been vindicating to go over and above knocking this one out of the park. (Expository work had been the lifeblood of my non-institutionalized math life.) There was so more I could have said about the generalized factorial, and applications (like the fractional calculus), but it was a busy semester and I didn't get to it all. It's hardly an excuse that Prof. Lai wrote an approving comment and gave me full credit for those four pages.
+I wish I had allocated more time to it. This was my one opportunity in my institutionalized math career to "write a paper" and not merely "complete an assignment"; it would have been vindicating to go over and above knocking this one out of the park. (Expository work had been the lifeblood of my non-institutionalized math life.) There was so much more I could have said about the generalized factorial, and applications (like the fractional calculus), but it was a busy semester and I didn't get to it all. It's hardly an excuse that Prof. Lai wrote an approving comment and gave me full credit for those four pages.
I was resolved to do better on the take-home final than the take-home midterm, but it was a struggle. I eventually got everything, but what I submitted ended up having five footnotes to various _math.stackexchange.com_ answers. (I was very transparent about my reasoning process; no one could accuse me of dishonesty.) For one problem, I ended up using formulas for the modulus of the derivative of a Bashke factor at 0 and the preimage of zero which I found in David C. Ulrich's _Complex Made Simple_ from the University library. It wasn't until after I submitted my work that I realized that the explicit formulas had been unnecessary; the fact that they were inverses followed from the inverse function theorem.
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.
-Prof. Ross is an outstanding schoolteacher, the best I encountered at SFSU. I choose my words here very carefully. I don't mean he was my favorite professor. I mean that he was good at his job as understood in Society: his lectures were clear and well-prepared, and puncutated with group work on well-designed worksheets (pedogogically superior to the whole class just being lecture). The assignments and tests were fair, and so on.
+Prof. Ross is an outstanding schoolteacher, the best I encountered at SFSU. I choose my words here very carefully. I don't mean he was my favorite professor. I mean that he was good at his job as understood in Society: his lectures were clear and well-prepared and puncutated with group work on well-designed worksheets (pedogogically superior to the whole class just being lecture), the assignments and tests were fair, and so on.
+
+[TODO— square on the first day; dihedral group; "those are just words"; maybe the Schuster comparison goes here; you can see why he was not my favorite professor]
"Modern Algebra I" met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. All of my other classes met Tuesdays and Thursdays. I had wondered whether I could save myself a lot of commuting by ditching algebra most of the time, but started off the semester dutifully attending—and, as long as I was on campus that day anyway, also sitting in on Prof. Ross's "Topology" ("MATH 450") and doing the worksheet with an acquaintance in that class, even though I couldn't commit to a fourth math course for credit.
The course covered the basics of group theory, with a little bit about rings at the end of the semester. The textbook was Joseph A. Gallian's _Contemporary Abstract Algebra_, which I found to be in insultingly poor taste. The contrast between "Modern Algebra I" ("MATH 335") and "Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable" ("MATH 730") that semester did persuade me that the course numbers did have semantic content in their first digit (3xx = insulting, 4xx or cross-listed 4xx/7xx = requires effort, 7xx = potentially punishing).
-I mostly treated the algebra 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. One week I started working on the prequisite chapter on polynomial rings from the algebraic geometry book Prof. Ross had just written with his partner Prof. 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.
+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. One week I started working on the prequisite chapter on polynomial rings from the algebraic geometry book Prof. Ross had just written with his partner Prof. 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.
- * algebra tutoring and punch card
+I posted a somewhat disappointing 79/90 (87.8%) on the final, mostly due to stupid mistakes or laziness on my part. 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 that in class.
### Not Sweating the Fake Stuff (Non-Math)
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff