New design

In keeping with my serious image , I suppose I should disavow any concern with the mere appearance of this site. The reason for changing was that the previous format displayed the comments in very small type, making it a bit hard to read mathematics. Obviously, popular blogs are not constructed primarily to facilitate scientific communication.

 

As motivation,

consider that if you showed serious initiative in working out a scholarly theory of the sort mentioned in the previous post, I would probably write you a reference letter that might well render poor performance on the exam completely irrelevant

 

In fact

Let me use this occasion to pose a question that might even be serious research material. Can one come up with a good measure of similarity between successive exams? That is to say, suppose you wanted to show me with suitably convincing rigor that I was really deviating from previous years. How would you do it? Of course, this would require a good theory combining formal logic, linguistics, epistemology, and of course, mathematics, both in the form of the theory and in the specific construction of the models that the theory tries to work with. I’m sure that a truly satisfactory theory would be close to impossible at this point. But it still might be fun to start thinking about it.

Very roughly speaking, there should be

a space of linear algebra exams

possibly of very high dimension, endowed with a natural inner product, using which we can measure the distance between exams. In this space, you might attempt to show that the exams of previous years form a pretty tight cluster, while my exam is convincingly distant from that cluster.

If you’re interested in thinking about a problem of that sort, let me know. I’m not an applied mathematician, but I think we might be able to do something.

 

Another remark on travel

Because I’ve recently begun posting links to conferences or seminars I go to, I thought I’d add a clarifying comment. The purpose of it, at least consciously, was not to show off that I’m a busy guy or something of that sort. It’s rather that for any serious mathematician, a complex web of obligations makes demands that oftentimes take time away from efforts aimed towards the direct benefit of students at his or her home institution. For example, I was absent for several days of this week because my two post-graduate students at Purdue were having their thesis defense, the last step in the process of obtaining their doctoral degrees. But then, by making the nature of such activities transparent, I hoped that my immediate absence might be rendered more understandable. In fact, I thought it might even create a better sense of global connectedness for the students at UCL in that teachers, after all, are shared the world over, hopefully to the benefit of the whole global community. (Probably I flatter myself.) This is also why I encourage students at UCL to come to lectures delivered by visiting academics or to try in general to take part in academic activities that go beyond the classroom.

 

Travel

This is to let students know that I am at a conference in Bangalore, India. I will have occasional access to the internet and will try to get to your questions as soon as possible, but you have to expect some delays until 5 April.

 

Submission form

I’ve finally figured out how to make a submission form for your questions. Hopefully, this will facilitate communication. Only text is allowed, so use some clear and approximately consistent methodology for typing mathematics. If you have a sophisticated question, you can send a PDF file via email. As for comments to previous posts, I presume you already know what to do.

MK

 

More about this blog

It seems reasonable at this point to extend an invitation to others who may have mathematical questions that are suitable for discussions on this blog. For example, students in my tutorial groups are strongly encouraged to use this medium. However, even if you’re enrolled in some other mathematics course at UCL, or, for that matter, a random student who found out about this site and wishes to pose a question, feel free to send it to me using the submission form or by email and I’ll do my best to reply. The email address to use is

myfirstname.mylastname@ucl.ac.uk

The email option is useful if your question is complicated and you need to attach a file.

Best,

Minhyong Kim

 

Dear Students,

The intention of this blog is to facilitate communication with my current students. I expect many of the discussions to start from replies to email queries on specific mathematical issues. But if there are other general topics you would like me to comment on, please let me know using the submission form, by email, or by attaching a comment to a post here.

I will include occasionally some remarks on the topics that come up in class, so check back frequently.

MK