School started week before last. My health insurance started week before last also. Both are good things. I've been into the health center for fear of a sinus infection and then to the dental clinic to set up an appointment because I did not have a sinus infection and my jaw hurts pretty badly. My jaw appears to be hurting because my teeth hurt, and not vice versa. We'll see what the damage is when the 29th rolls around.
As for school, its good times. I'm taking Topics in Probability and Topics in the History of Mathematics. Both classes were those which I didn't particularly have a fondness for as an undergraduate student, but they are turning out alright. Probability is actually engaging, for the first time in my short life of studying math. I have always found probability to be pointless, but the class is challenging enough to at least keep me distracted from my sheer distaste for the subject.
As for the History class: 1) I have never liked history, period. My one brief perchance upon a desire to learn anything historically related was directly related to the attractiveness of my professor. Hot Teacher = A desire to learn history in order to impress him with my intellect. 2) There are mathematics teachers and there are mathematicians, and rarely are the two interrelated. This particular class is taught by a mathematician. Not only a mathematician, but one that likes to ramble about his intellectual thoughts, which he seems incapable of relaying to us in any manner that we can actually follow. He spent 45 minutes last Monday lecturing incoherently to convey a single sentence which I'm surprised he managed to spit out at all: "Mathematics is us thinking about the universe, and we haven't got it quite right yet." It was at this point that I realized his objective in the lecture was to express to us the difficulty in defining mathematics as a field of study. Up until this point, rambling about a finite number of axioms and the difficulty of such axioms as the axiom of choice seemed to be his primary objective.
Some of my classmates in both courses have taken to going to happy hour between Probability and History on Wednesdays. I can't say I don't understand their frustration and desire to take it to higher authority, but I also don't see the point. Here's what will happen in pressing the teacher for a more straight forward class: things will get more confusing and more homework will be assigned as a result. Instructors like this particular professor are not communicators, and attempting to express your displeasure with the class is not going to suddenly change his ability to coherently communicate lessons and ideas. What we consider a cry for clear communication he will take a cry for a more vigorous class. Its just the way it works. "You say you want me to more thoroughly define the homework?" A more thorough definition is always longer and involves more steps. Case in point: more homework.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have enough time to do a little extra work, its not the work load I mind. I just know how this is going to go. And it isn't going to end the way they hope it will by being squeaky wheels. Personally, I find him to be mildly amusing. His lectures are like puzzles and you just have to sit back and wait for the point to appear for a split second. I suppose its like those magic eye pictures that used to be so popular where you stared at them until your eyes crossed and then suddenly a 3-D bubble would pop out and you spent the next half hour destroying your vision to figure out what the hell the bubble was supposed to be. Lectures by mathematicians are like that. They're kind of fun if you're patient.
That is school in a nut shell.
School and the Health Center are about all I've really accomplished in the last couple weeks. I am working also, but, its work as usual. There aren't any raving mathematicians at work to make me laugh and slowly drive to a nut house. Just music students. Maybe a few crazy parents. They're not as enjoyable as mathematicians.
Catch ya next week.
