Math Camp Day 1

I have now been in Chicago for almost 5 days, and I am finally starting to kinda enjoy being here. Things have been weird, but I've been told I should be optimistic that things will continue to get better. Today was my first day of Math Camp. Since nearly everybody in my new class of 150 students is over 25 years old, Math Camp is supposed to be a math refresher course for people who have been away from math for awhile. The camp is a refresher on algebra and basic calculus, so I'm not too worried about the work. I am thrilled to say this was one of the easiest math classes I have ever had. If every class is like this, grad school is gonna be a breeze (unlikely).

On a separate note, I'm one of the youngest people in the program, which I'm sure will be really weird as I become friends with these people.

After 1 day of camp, I have a feeling I will have daily material to share with you guys. So here goes:

The Professor

He said that he wasn't technically a professor, and he sure didn't act like any math teacher I've ever head. He wore a bright turquoise Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and low top Converses. He seemed aware that he was teaching us math that we all learned in 8th grade. There was mutual amusement that we spent 45 min going over what numbers are, the definitions of subtraction and division, how variables are different than numbers, etc.

Brilliant Math Note of the Day

3 = 3.000000000000000000000... (He actually wrote that on the board)

Lunch

They provided us with lunch for what I'm sure was the first and last time. While we were eating pizza, they passed microphones around the room as all 150 of us gave a few sentence bio on who were. Since everybody else is older than me, they all had significant work experience, and some people had really impressive stories. My class mostly consists of Midwesterns and international students from Mexico/Central America and Asia. Each of the Chinese students first gave us their hard to understand Chinese names and their handpicked english names. Some of them picked really strange ones, like Fancy, Kiki, and Mo. I'll admit that I had a hard time understanding them, so I may have misheard.

When it was my turn to speak, I didn't know what to say. Since I graduated in May, I didn't have much of a story to share. Everybody started out by saying where they were from, where they went to School, and where they had worked. While I was waiting for my turn, I debated whether I wanted to go the safe route. I could just give the limited story I have, or I could make a joke and hope it stuck. Obviously, I went with the joke. I said I was from NJ, graduated from Duke in May, and before that... I was in high school. The high school comment got an enormous room wide laugh and round of applause (I was pretty happy with myself). I was sure that I was going to end up with the biggest laugh out of all 150 speakers. Unfortunately, near the end, an International Student spoke loud and aggressively and said something legitimately hysterical. It was hard to understand him when he said it, so unfortunately I can't remember what he said at all. So rather than having the funniest comment, I merely had the funniest one among the white people in the room. I can't say that very often, so I'll be thrilled if that ends up on my tomb stone one day.

Brilliant Math Note #2

Infinities come in different sizes. Although I knew this already, I'm always amused that some infinities are bigger than others. Just something interesting to think about.

D

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