Hello everyone. It was nice to see those of you who I got a chance to, and sorry I missed the rest of you. After lazing around for a month, I’m back in Cambridge, and back to work. This term I’m thinking of taking:
- Set Theory and Logic
- Topos Theory – a branch of category theory
- Percolation and Combinatorics – combinatorial questions related to models of liquids percolating through a porous substance. So far this seems to focus on questions about random subgraphs of infinite, locally finite (each vertex has a finite number of neighbors) graphs.
- Decision Problems in Group Theory – Given a presentation for a group, what properties of that group can be computed (e.g. is it abelian, etc)
- Additive Combinatorics – Combinatorics with a dash of analysis, or analysis with a dash of combinatorics. We are starting off with discrete Fourier analysis and Roth’s theorem on the existence of 3-term arithmetic progressions in any sufficiently dense finite subset of the natural numbers.
I will probably be dropping one of these courses at some point because its just too many, but right now I can’t decide which.
I went rowing today for the first time in over a month.
In other news, there was a large march today in Cambridge protesting the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the occupation in general. I was busy working when I started hearing the chant “Occupation is a crime! Free, free Palestine!” coming from outside my window. On the street below there was a very diverse group of a few hundred people.
Americans have forgotten how to protest. This looked bigger than any demonstration I ever saw in Fort Collins (a city about the same size as Cambridge), even during the height of the Iraq war. There were apparently similar protests across the UK today, with 5,000 people turning up in Birmingham and 20,000 in London, for the second week in a row.
“Americans have forgotten how to protest.”
Oh, they haven’t forgotten how to protest- they’ve just forgotten about the world beyond our shores. Boulder was more than happy to protest the McCain/Palin campaign, the police action on 4/20, and even the cutting down of a large tree a few years ago. But these are all local issues, and the closest thing to an international “protest” you ever see on campus these days is a quiet display of flags on the quad every spring to show the death tolls since the beginning of the Iraq war. And nobody even glances at those anymore.
Comment by Cat — 19 January 2009 @ 5:44