June 15, 2022: Resnik on Fire

Before Classes (SIAM Conference)

After I woke up (around 6, as usual), I went down into the lobby to dance (as usual) (probably around 6:30). Once I finished dancing, RW, EB, and EW came downstairs (around 7:30). They were going to a math (combinatorics) talk in the morning (the talk was from 8-8:45 am).

You see, this week, there’s a math conference going on at CMU called the SIAM Conference (SIAM does not stand for “Sleep in a mattress,” as Po joked). If any of us particularly wanted to go to a talk, we were given permission to skip the morning classes to go!

I decided to go to the talk, as well, since I didn’t really have anything to do in the morning, anyway. So I went upstairs to take a quick rinse and then came back downstairs (with my backpack full of stuff I needed for the day). By the time I came down, however, it was almost 7:50 am, and I still hadn’t eaten! I didn’t even know where the talk was!

So I grabbed a few breakfast bars from the snack table and ate as I hurried to the talk.

I managed to get to the right building, eventually. The talk was in the McConomy Auditorium in Jared L. Cohon University Center. The speaker was on Zoom. I was late a few minutes, so I missed all the basic definitions she explained at the beginning.

The talk itself was also quite advanced, resulting in me understanding almost none of it. All I know is that it was presented by Julia Wolf, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, about “Irregular Triads in 3-uniform hypergraphs.” Whatever that is.

Class

After the talk, we walked straight to class. RZ taught our morning class. It was on hat problems, so we basically spent the whole hour and a half doing variations of hat problems. It was a lot of fun! At some point, some of the boys were writing something very very complicated-seeming and looking very very smart doing it. Now, I’m still not entirely sure what sort of thing they could possibly be writing about that could be so complicated with HAT PROBLEMS, of all things, but we girls saw it and decided to join in the fun 🤩. Note the angry wizard, Shakespeare hearts (the context for that is that AZ‘s phone case, as well as AGe‘s, contains a bunch of little Shakespeares with heart eyes. In fact, RW’s friend started that, actually: she printed a bunch of Shakespeare cutouts, handed them out as stickers, and now there’s basically a Shakespeare cult at their school.), the (🙂, 🙁) coordinates, the fishbowl by the poisson distribution, and the normal curve transformed into a turtle (next to the QED).

After the hat problem class, JLin sent a quiz about recognizing all the MOPpers, so I tried to do it during the passing period between first class and Joel Spencer’s talk. I think I got around 75%.

Joel Spencer Talk

Po talked about how Joel Spencer was incredibly inspiring and mentioned that he was basically the only reason Po started in math in the first place.

Joel Spencer’s talk was about the number of labeled rooted forests (proven using Prüfer codes) and the number of labeled graphs containing only one cycle. The latter was essentially just a forest where the roots were in a cycle, so we could derive something from the first thing. I think he probably dumbed it down for us kids. The first half, which was focused on the labeled rooted forests, was rather easy.

At the end, he also talked about Paul Erdös. He knew the man personally, even going to the extent of calling Erdös “Uncle Erdös.” He said that Erdös had a certain energy that made everyone around him better at math. He had the ability to figure out problems that were not trivial but also not absolutely impossible for people to understand. It was really interesting. Apparently, at some talk or other, Spencer introduced Erdös and described Erdös’ Book (he claims there is a Book in which all the prettiest, most elegant proofs of all problems go) as something to do with God. Erdös came onto the stage and immediately contradicted Spencer, pointing out that one can not believe in God but the Book would still exist.

Lunch

After Spencer’s talk, we went to lunch at Resnik. However, apparently, Resnik was on fire, because when we got there, we couldn’t actually go in. We were planning on leaving to go to Chipotle, but then, the fire apparently disappeared, so we went inside. And then the alarm started up again.

At that point, we completely gave up and headed to Chipotle.

However, once we reached Chipotle, we decided we didn’t actually want Chipotle, apparently (btw, apparently, some MOPpers at Chipotle were talking about graph theory (due to the Spencer talk), and at the table right next to them, a bunch of non-MOPpers were talking about the exact. Same. THING!) (Also, apparently I say “apparently” too much). Instead, we went one shop over, to Orient Express. There weren’t very many people: only around ten. Mostly, we just weren’t as chaotic as last time, so it felt like there were half as many people.

At 1:30-2:15, there was a SIAM Conference talk by Lisa Sauermann (MIT), about the Erdös-Ginzburg-Ziv Problem. I have no idea what that is because I didn’t go to the talk. According to Po, she was a past IMOer, so he recommended we go, but by the time we finished lunch, we were already going to be thirty minutes late, so we ended up not going.

Test 3

At 2:30-7, we had Test 3.

Right before the test, some of the boys were running around on the grass, chasing JC around to steal his hat. I thought this was very much fun, so I joined in! I stole his hat, as well, but he managed to get it back.

Later, as we sat in the testing room, I sat behind AZ who sat behind JC. They were sort of laughing at me, like, “Sophie you can’t get the hat during the test, you know,” and I was like, “Too bad so sad, I want to sit here anyway.”

AZ was very interesting to sit behind. He sighs very loudly when he can’t figure out a problem. Also, when he goes to the bathroom and comes back, he always walks past his seat a few steps and then realizes, oh wait, there’s my seat! And rushes back to his seat. It’s very amusing. It happened, like, three times, and it makes me wonder how he can keep forgetting where he sits.

Some other very interesting testing habits include KWu, who goes outside the testing room with paper and pencil and just works outside, because he thinks better when he can move, so you know that if he comes in three times, that means he swept the test :P. (Here at MOP, “sweeping” a test means you solved everything while being swept by a test means getting nothing. Because, you know. Moppers. Janitors. Whatever) During test 1, I remember one time as I was going to the bathroom and coming back, I walked past someone who was jumping to touch the ceiling, and so I tried to do the same. I could not manage because I was too short, and they were like, “You can do it!” It was rather funny.

The first problem on the test was something about equilateral triangles, and because I was bored, I decided to write a story about a triangular cape Red Riding Hood’s grandmother made for her.

(At one of his storytimes, Po mentioned that he knew he wasn’t the best at MOP but he tried his best to just be nice. He would solve the problems in ridiculous, convoluted ways to amuse the graders. I then decided that I’m not actually good enough at math to solve them in purposefully ridiculous, convoluted ways because that requires the ability to actually solve them in the first place, so instead, I’ll write an amusing story)

HM graded that test and found the story very amusing, so I got 1.0 style points on problem 1!

Miscellaneous Evening Shenanigans

During dinner, I got my first ever wrong number text! They said something stupid, so I rickrolled them, and then it devolved into just trading memes. It was very difficult, considering I know no memes :P,

I’m not absolutely stupid: I did not actually tell them my real name. I just said my name was “Lucas” because I had Lucas’s nametag.

I actually went to test review today.

At 2:12 pm (the only reason I know this time is because after KS brought it up on the 16th, I wrote the time down), KS and I talked about JC‘s blog on AoPS (Eyed). I was saying that I was very incredibly impressed because he writes the exact times of many things on his blog. Like, he’ll say “I woke up at 7:14 am and did so and so, and then at 7:57 am I went to breakfast with so and so,” and so on, and I was just very impressed by his ability to do this all. Kristie pointed out that he probably just looked at the time and remembered it. I was like, sure, you might look at the time when something happens, but you wouldn’t actually remember it when writing your blog at 1 am!

JC was working on his primes report tonight because apparently, the first draft is due tonight. He sort of jokingly suggested I could help him fix his grammar. Now, the thing is I like feeling useful, and grammar is basically the only way I can be useful because my math definitely is nowhere good enough to check the math, so I agreed. I think he was rather surprised I agreed, but it was decently interesting.

Apparently, JC and MLu debated whether the mafia would win, and they decided that we might “cuz y’all are so nice and unassuming.” Thanks, man. 😛