June 17, 2022: Frisbee and Improv

In the morning, once I woke up and danced, I went upstairs to fold my laundry (that I washed yesterday).

Classes

The first class of the day was manipulation and bounding, from VW, in which he essentially showed us troll ways of solving problems that made us all groan. It was quite interesting.

The second class of the day was linear algebra and polynomials 2, from RZ. I feel like I’ve definitely become more comfortable with linear algebra after her classes. We were working with Nikodym sets. It was a continuation of the previous linear algebra class, so we used null space and the rank-nullity theorem to prove that the size of such a set is at least c_n pⁿ for some c_n.

During lunch, someone was asking me about DC Live and if he would be able to get into it. I was like, almost definitely, lol, considering you’re a MOPper and therefore very very good at math. I decided to go and ask Po about it because the guy was still sort of unsure. So I went up to Po and stood there awkwardly for a while, as he was talking to the people at his table, and waited for him to finish talking.

Then, Po looked up at me, glanced at my expression, and just went, “Oh no.” Before I could say anything, he said, “Whatever it is, yes.”

It was kind of funny, honestly. I asked, “What? Why?”

And he was like, “I can tell you want something.”

And I was like, lol, your first reaction to me asking something is saying yes, good to know :P.

Anyway, then, he started telling everyone about DC Live.

I asked him why he didn’t post about it to the MOPpers on the MOP discord. He said he didn’t want to misuse his position of authority or something, so he didn’t want to advertise about it on the MOP discord. Because he didn’t want to post, I decided to do it for him :P, so I went and posted a post about DC Live in the general channel of the discord.

Also, during lunch, RW gave me one of the many origami turtles they’ve been making! (I still have it <3)

Test 4 and Frisbee

After lunch, we took Test 4.

In the test, I once again wrote a story for problem 1 about…I really don’t know what, in all honesty. It was really just word vomit. Apparently, the country of Asdfghjkl had long been in turmoil until, embroiled into a Civil War, tremulous union was broken? Asdfg and Hjkl wen their separate ways, both sides filled with resentment and hatred towards the other. Then, something about an underground bunker later, some spy or something got lost and had to figure out the way out, which somehow turned into the geometry problem? I’m not really sure, I wrote that page in less than ten minutes, possibly less than five.

After the test, we played (ultimate) frisbee. I initially went with them so I could take pictures, but then I started playing with them, too. I was very very bad, but it was also quite fun. The people who played were DX, IZ, LZ, MK, and VT, along with JC, KWu, and AZ, along with JW and I. JC was very good.

JC was so kind as to give me the hat as we played frisbee because it was getting too hot and he didn’t want to wear it. Geez thanks.

I was incredibly delighted (I was like, wow, thanks!) for a moment and then I realized I didn’t actually want to wear it while running around, either, and also it was damp and therefore disgusting because he was sweating, so I just put it down on my backpack.

Later, as he was catching a frisbee, his keycard fell out of his pocket, so I put that in his hat.

Anyway, after we finished playing frisbee, I decided to keep the hat. He was sad and tried to get it back, but I stuck my ponytail through the hole in the back and kept it :P.

Improv Class

After that, we went to dinner. Then, we went to an improv class for all of MOP outside of Tepper. It was quite fun. Since we had so many people, we split into two groups. My group kept using olympiad problem references and saying “I lost the game.” It was funny the first few times, but by the end of the class, it became sort of insufferable. I noticed that VinL and DiaL were standing with the other group, so I went over and joined them.

At that point, LR, who was in our group, also found us too dull, so he also snuck into the other group.

Some of the activities we did were:

• In the big group: walk, freeze
  • Round 1: when he (the instructor) says walk, we walk (preferably in weird, wonky, interesting ways); when he says freeze, we freeze
  • Round 2: round 1 + when he says name, we say our name (Turtle actually said “Turtle” :P)
  • Round 3: round 2 + when he says clap, we clap
  • Round 4: reversed! (Uno reverse card applied :P!) Name means clap and clap means name, freeze means walk and walk means freeze
• In the lost-the-game-group (in circle): clapping
  • Round 1: first person looks at the person to the left of them and, with no communication, just communication through eye contact, they must clap at the same time. Then the second person does it to the person left of them, and so on, until the clap goes around the circle.
  • Round 2: the clap can go to the left or the right (so the same two people can clap many times in a row)
  • Round 3: more than one clap going around
    • However, because our group is kind of bad at following instructions, we started just clapping randomly at round 2
  • Round 4: clap can go to anyone, not just the person right next to you.
• Lost-the-game-group: introductions
  • We went around introducing ourselves using alliterations and motions that people had to copy.
  • I kept not knowing what to do, so I kept switching spots with other people and letting them go first, until someone suggested I just be “Switching Sophie.” So then my motion was I gave the nametag I had on to the person to the left of me, sort of hoping that everyone would thusly switch nametags. They didn’t follow the rules of the game, though, and no such thing happened 🙁 And then they started trying to steal my blue hat >:(.
  • A lot of people did an alliteration about geometry (either hating or loving it)
• Lost-the-game-group: Human statue/sculpture things?
  • One of the sculptures we made had one person (Lucas Tang) on one knee proposing 😛
    • Apparently math minds think alike, as I think there was something similar in the other group, too.
• Then, there was this thing called “Yes, and” where one person said part of a story, and then next person says “Yes, and” continues the story
  • This devolved into many invisible rabbits and hunters and infinite fields and losing games
• Then there was a thing where one person hands another an invisible gift, and then the other makes up what was in the gift and the first person has to explain why they “gave” that gift
• Then, in the other group, there was something called “Bunny bunny”
  • Person says “Bunny bunny” to someone else in the circle, and then the other person has to respond with a “Bunny bunny”
  • And then it becomes more complicated, too, wherein the people next to the “Bunny bunny”er must flail and say “Tiki toki,” and everyone else sort of keeps up a steady beat while this happens, and then more bunnies are added in the mix

JC was planning on going to improv class. However, he walked into a bench and hurt himself. It was really rather ironic, as he didn’t manage to hurt himself while diving around for the frisbee, but did manage to get hurt just wandering around. Because he was hurt, he did not go to improv.

I did not go to test review bc I decided it would be too late. Also, I was just lazy.

Some Last Shenanigans

While I was hanging out in Stever, I ran into the TJ kids. We talked for a while, took a few selfies, and formed the DiaL cult! Besides love of the word “honorable,” DiaL cult consists of saluting poorly. She’s adorable <3

Then JC shows up, does some piggy backs, steals the hat, and is piggy backed by FY. Isn’t he injured?

JC also told me about some MOP memes and experiences from last year. For instance, “greenish” last year began as some of the boys in green getting together to do math, but that gradually expanded to include more people until eventually, it was just a lot of kids getting together to fool around as they did math. They would, like, go and post solutions on AoPS with twenty cited co-solvers.

He also talked about his philosophy of eating sugar and the all-nighter. Essentially, he doesn’t eat sugar for all of MOP so that when he eats sugar on the last day, he’ll get a really good high and be really awake. It was a bit bizarre.