Inspired by Flix’s chemical jewellery, I did a little Googling and found these beauties:
Earrings inspired by hyperbolic geometry (as discussed on the site to which the image links)
String parabola earrings on sale at Etsy
Möbius strip earrings? Je pense que oui!
And a rather gorgeous yet I-dread-to-think-how-expensive necklace with fractal patterns
I must admit, it’s the Möbius strips which would win me over!
Just a quick note to say that I got my results t’other day. After several incorrect mental calculations, I have finally swallowed my pride, used a calculator, and come out with an average of 60.5, or a borderline 2:1. Combined with last year’s marks, I now have a degree average of 69.9, or an infuriating 0.1% off a first.
I really don’t know how to feel about that. My head is telling me that I’ve done better that I can ever have hoped to have done, and that I owe one hell of a lot to one friend in particular, S, who has supported me through the year both in and out of lectures and has gone way beyond the call of friendship in doing so. He deserves every single percent of his own 96 average! I also know that on top of that I will have a good case for mitigation*, and hey, a 2:1 is perfectly respectable.
Despite all that, though, I’ve just been left feeling a bit numb. On a normal year I’d've missed the first – and be gutted. There’s still a nagging part of me that wonders just how much of it was due to the year and just how much I’d've done poorly anyway, and there’s the disappointment at the exam marks for a couple of modules in particular. 48 on Maths Teaching. 48! At least it was brought up to 69 by the coursework, but still…! On the plus side though that’s the first (and last) essay exam that I will have done since A-Level, so it may just be a question of live and learn.
I suppose that what I’m really terrified of is having a similar experience next year. I always said that if I didn’t come out with a first class degree then it wouldn’t be the end of the world – and yes, I do still firmly believe that. It’s just that if I don’t do as well as I might have wanted, I want it to be because the Maths was too hard and not because other shit got in the way. If that makes sense?
Year closed, eh?
x
*Although after a close friend’s recent experience, I wouldn’t trust mitigation to get me anything. I’m certainly not banking on it.
Two more exams to go, both tomorrow. Nearly there, so nearly there, so nearly there…!
Two days before the exam of her hardest module, Lucy discovers – after a day of trying to learn the basics of the course and getting nowhere – that she is in fact still missing notes from at least two missed lectures, possibly more. Well, shit.
Outlook from this morning, North-East of England, fair to moderate:
DG:6
DS: 7
G: 7
GT: 6
NT: 3
MT: 8
Average: 37/6 = 6.16666. Rising slowly – sunny intervals.
x
Jenny’s most recent post reminded me that I have progress to report on another front. As of a bit over two weeks ago now, I have been taking 40mg a day of Citalopram and finally I can boast to mood levels which a bit more than ‘functional’. There are still days when I dip quite badly, there are still frequent patches of disabling anxiety, and I still have the concentration span of a gnat for the greater part of things. But all of these are getting lesser, gradually, and I really am hopeful that this is what’s going to work for me – more and more I am just starting to feel like ‘me’ again, which is nice! And y’know, everyone’s allowed a bit of third year exam stress, aren’t they?
Even better, I’m having counselling again. It’s with a new person as the woman I was seeing before still isn’t back from long-term sick leave. When I rang up the service to arrange things before the start of term, I surprised myself by asking to speak to someone female. I still to this day don’t quite know why, but to have them say “Yes, of course”, unquestioningly, was such a relief. Sometimes emotions just don’t rely on logic, I guess, and for once I don’t feel majorly inadequate for putting that into practice.
So yes. I hope I’m not speaking too soon, but long may the general trend continue :-)
I’m knackered, as in really knackered, but I’m about to head out to the Science Site again because I volunteered to provide photocopiable lecture notes to someone who left theirs at home by mistake. The irony is not lost on me, given that I only finished copying up my reams of photocopies from first term missed lectures two days ago. Do unto others etc., but I could really just curl up and sleep right now, or even curl up while reading through some, I dunno, Galois Theory. ‘Cos despite currently being on t’internet, it’s an OK working day today.
I should just stop being so nice (she tells herself, smugly. Get a grip, girl.)
The current forecast is as follows. 10 = I reckon I’ll do myself justice in this module, irrespective of circumstances. 0 = FAIL.
DG:4
DS: 8
G: 6
GT: 7
NT: 0
MT: 10
Average: 35/6 = 5.83333. Hmm.
, if you’re out there at all. Or indeed in here, I’m not fussy, honestly, I’m not.
1. Please make my hip stop hurting constantly. You have no idea how painful it is, and if you could rid me for good of this stupid back problem at the same time that’d be awesome.
2. Any chance of some sun?
3. Or some proper emotion? This constant dull nothingness is getting kinda tedious, and it’d be nice to be able to interact properly with my housemates before we have to move out this summer.
4. Do you really have to keep allowing all these bad things happening to people I care about?
5. You’re omniscient, right… so you can explain Maths to me! Nothing more annoying than a smart-arse who sits there being smug and refusing to divulge, though I realise that I’ve probably been guilty of that myself on occasion before. I’m sorry. But I’m really really stuck at the minute, so pretty please? Just some clues.
Yours sincerely, Amen, and PleaseThankYou,
Lucy
I.Hate.Number.Theory.So.Much.It’s.Not.True
Not in theory, exactly, but bloody hell, in practice… This is the first of six modules that I am working through incrementally, the start of the first of six modules and there’s no way in hell that I can pass this exam in the time I have. If I can, it will be to the cost of other modules.
And if I’m going to fail anyway, is there even any point in trying?
Things what’s been ‘appening recently, in no particular order. It’s a bit of a long’un, I warn you:
- At about half twelve this lunchtime, I experienced a moment of real triumph when I finally got my basic GUI to work. No glitches, no incorrect syntax, no user-traps, and a beautiful, beautiful programme that does exactly what it’s meant to (and I even know why!). I had a bit of advice in the early parts from a CompSci friend who has a rather quicker grasp of object handling than I, but we both agreed that him pointing me in the direction was a much better approach than him actually doing the coding for me – and I designed and built the actual interface part myself from start to finish. Which I have to say I’m pretty proud of, considering that I’m by no means the fastest coder and that this is where I am only twelve hours after first sitting down and going, “So, MATLAB….”
I would post a picture, but unfortunately I only have access to the software on the university computers so it may have to wait for a future occasion. I know, I know!
It’s not the end of the road by any means, but what’s left to do simply involves modifying and titivating what I already have – all the code is essentially written. Oh, and then I have to make it into a 15-minute presentation for seven days’ time. And write a 4000-word essay… but hey, I’ll be in a much stronger position to do that with the programme there.
x
- In a related vein, I’ve come to a decision of sorts with regards to my degree. And I guess that the above paragraphs tell you that decision already – I’ve decided to carry on as best I can. The citalopram has by no means made things go away as such, but it does seem to have made me sufficiently stable to contemplate thinking about things again, even if to a slightly reduced capacity.
The fact is that the university have left me with no choice but to fight or accept failure. And I am going to be of the ones who fights their damn hardest.
When my parents came up ten days ago, my Mum and I discussed strategies – for working, and modules, and the like. As a result, I have now spoken to two lecturers about Stuff – about the fact that I’ve been struggling, about why I haven’t handed in any homeworks this year, and about the fact that it will take an absolute miracle for me to pass this year and that any help would be appreciated. In addition to the fact that my Maths Teaching lecturers already knew*, that covers half my modules. Well, two and a half, anyway, and that includes the second half of Number Theory which is the one that I really can’t do.
x
- As of a few weeks ago, I have two new housemates and a prospective house for next year, which is nice. I’ve met the second housemate twice (!) and have yet to see the house, but I’ve been very nicely guaranteed a bed in college should that all fall through, and it’s quite nice to have some security. Great as college was in my first year I really don’t want to move back in, and at one point I thought that I was going to have no choice – and the one thing worse than living in college would have been living with people who didn’t know me or my situation.
x
- I was sitting in one of the IT classrooms earlier, playing about with bits of code and trying to work out why I couldn’t assign a value to my global variable (I figured it out eventually**) and idly watching the screen of the lad just in front of me (yes, bad Lucy, I know). He was on Google Maps. He typed in somewhere in Cumbria, and zoomed in really close on to what looked like a school building. He paused there for a while, then scrolled the map along, following a series of roads along a particular route.
I know where he was scrolling. He was scrolling home. I had to look away because I was in danger of being overwhelmed by the homesickness that prompts me to do the same thing.
It’s funny how similar we all are :-)
x
*Reason 1: Summative coursework. Reason 2: I was in close contact with large numbers of school kids six days into fluoxetine. I mean, come on?!
**Two identical variable names, one global, one local. Yes, that was very stupid.
There are many reasons why I’m quite fond of my Maths Teaching module, but one of them is that it contains summative work – namely coursework that actually counts towards 50% of the module*. Some of that was a learning report based upon lesson observation that we did last term**, but the higher percentage of the marks come from this term’s essay and presentation.
Our brief is very general. We have to take any second year degree level material (- probably Maths but not necessarily) and discuss the links between that and the teaching of school Maths. It should be aimed at teachers primarily, but with a secondary school student in mind in terms of application to learning – which obviously allows a huge amount of scope for interpretation and the opportunity to create our own project around what we are interested in. The presentations have already started happening, with people talking about what they have written – or intend to write – in their essays; just as disparate examples, topics so far have included ‘The significance of prime numbers’, ‘The Maths of Poker’, and ‘Maths in Indigenous Cultures’.
I want to do mine on matrix transformations – and more particularly on the visual interpretation thereof and why it’s a helpful approach to take to the learning of Linear Algebra, a very fundamental part of Maths which has applications in just about every branch you can care to think of. In order to do this, however, the essay itself is going to require a certain level of graphical input.
There’s the tried and tested drawing by hand followed by cut-and-paste approach, of course. But the potential for things going wrong, particularly when I get into three dimensional figures, is really quite high, and this is the 21st century after all. So as the geeks among you might have predicted, I started playing about with ways to do things digitally. Tester challenge: to draw a transparent unit cube, based on its vector co-ordinates.
First up was Maple, the program I used extensively last year for Numerical Analysis. It took hours of frustration to achieve this:
, which actually doesn’t look bad in the program itself. But my, was the coding messy, and my is the graphics quality poor, even when you think you’ve got it nailed by using PrintScreen rather than exporting as a JPEG. And I don’t think you can make GUIs*** in Maple, which was my next inspiration for an active demonstration of how this could be applied to teaching.
So there was really only one way to go. MATLAB. The ultimate powerful mathematical programming language, which I have no idea whatsoever how to use, but from what I do know of it would be perfect for this sort of thing. I spent three hours in the IT labs this afternoon, combing the Help sections while trying not to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff that I could never learn in a year, never mind a couple of weeks. But eventually I found what looked like a useful function, and after a bit of tweaking came up with this:
Much crisper, much tidier to code, and more to the point, much easier, potentially, to manipulate in the ways in which I want.
It’s only the start. I have yet to work out 2D plots. I have yet to work out how to write a single function producing such a figure, and GUIs are a mile away. But it’s a start. And it’s amazing how much easier I’ve found it to get down to some sort of ‘practical’ work.
x
*”So what?” I hear you cry. Well, every other Maths module (apart from the final-yr project module) rests 100% on a three-hour exam. And, y’know, I miss coursework! Even essays, ‘cos they now hold something of a novelty value.
**Which in my case occurred six days into taking fluoxetine! Score.
***GUI = Graphical User Interface – ie. something on the screen which a user can click or enter text into, and then it links to the code to produce a visual output. Basically like every bit of software we normally use (without needing to know the coding behind it). I created one in Java in that first-year programming module that I did, and it was a remarkably satisfying experience!
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