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stoutfellowThis has been an... interesting week.
Wednesday morning, I realized that the problem I'd had on Tuesday was that I was thinking like an algebraist instead of like a geometer. (Stoutfellow's First Law: Algebra gives knowledge, but geometry gives understanding.) Trying to find the coordinates of the vertices of a polyhedron by brute-force solution of equations was a mug's game from the beginning. Taking advantage of symmetries made the task much more tractable; it does require thinking about the precise behavior of those symmetries, but that's still much easier than the other way. At any rate, I've got the findCoordinates routine working reasonably well now. (There are still problems, and possibly bugs, but so far it's been able to do what I've asked of it.)
Thursday, I'd intended to stay home, but there was a committee meeting I'd forgotten about. I spent a few hours before the meeting fine-tuning things, trying to add further capacities to the algorithms, and revising my table of data - purging it of redundancies and the like. The committee meeting lasted less than fifteen minutes....
Friday, I was planning to give a quiz in my calculus class, but about twenty minutes into the lecture the lights went out. For the third time in three weeks, the campus had lost power; this time, the emergency lights didn't come on in the building I was in. I chatted with the students in the dark for a few minutes, then dismissed class. (Quiz *Monday*!) I went back to the Science Building, where the emergency lights were on, and W and I talked about polyhedra in his office. Power came back on just in time for our scheduled seminar meeting, which was abbreviated: we shared what results we'd been able to achieve in the past week and discussed what our student aide should do for his Senior Project. (I'd already shown each of the others, individually, most of what I'd done - too excited to wait for Friday - but W had some interesting things to tell us. He's going to start writing up our results soon; of course, he'll pass the draft around for comments and revisions.)
And tonight is another trivia night. This is supposed to be a large one, with maybe fifty tables - tough competition.
Wednesday morning, I realized that the problem I'd had on Tuesday was that I was thinking like an algebraist instead of like a geometer. (Stoutfellow's First Law: Algebra gives knowledge, but geometry gives understanding.) Trying to find the coordinates of the vertices of a polyhedron by brute-force solution of equations was a mug's game from the beginning. Taking advantage of symmetries made the task much more tractable; it does require thinking about the precise behavior of those symmetries, but that's still much easier than the other way. At any rate, I've got the findCoordinates routine working reasonably well now. (There are still problems, and possibly bugs, but so far it's been able to do what I've asked of it.)
Thursday, I'd intended to stay home, but there was a committee meeting I'd forgotten about. I spent a few hours before the meeting fine-tuning things, trying to add further capacities to the algorithms, and revising my table of data - purging it of redundancies and the like. The committee meeting lasted less than fifteen minutes....
Friday, I was planning to give a quiz in my calculus class, but about twenty minutes into the lecture the lights went out. For the third time in three weeks, the campus had lost power; this time, the emergency lights didn't come on in the building I was in. I chatted with the students in the dark for a few minutes, then dismissed class. (Quiz *Monday*!) I went back to the Science Building, where the emergency lights were on, and W and I talked about polyhedra in his office. Power came back on just in time for our scheduled seminar meeting, which was abbreviated: we shared what results we'd been able to achieve in the past week and discussed what our student aide should do for his Senior Project. (I'd already shown each of the others, individually, most of what I'd done - too excited to wait for Friday - but W had some interesting things to tell us. He's going to start writing up our results soon; of course, he'll pass the draft around for comments and revisions.)
And tonight is another trivia night. This is supposed to be a large one, with maybe fifty tables - tough competition.
