Classes and Seminars for Fall 2012

 MK Blathers  No Responses »
May 042012
 

Continuing with the series of posts on preparing for grad school, I hereby present a tentative schedule for the next semester (click to enlarge):

Tentative, yes, but the schedule will most likely stay the same, as long as I pass the written comps and the professors remain unchanged. I will be taking three courses: Kleiner‘s differental geometry, Tabak‘s partial differential equations, and Chatterjee‘s probability. I will also be doing a reading course with Germain: we will most likely cover Chapters 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 in Eli Stein’s Harmonic Analysis. Sitting in on McKean‘s harmonic analysis class seems like a good idea—I could use a good review of the basics.

As for the seminars, I’d think it would be silly not to attend the analysis seminar and the graduate student / postdoc seminar. I will also try my damnedest to attend the colloquium regularly, but my enthusiasm might wane after a few weeks of not understanding anything. There are other seminars I might want to attend sometime in the future, but I think this is quite enough for the first semester.

Written Comprehensive Exams

 MK Blathers  No Responses »
May 032012
 

I signed up for the September “quals“, which at NYU are called the written comprehensive examinamtions. The syllabus indicates that the exams are on advanced calculus, complex variables, and linear algebra. This seems fairly reasonable—certainly not as daunting as the exams at UChicago or UC Berkeley. The most similar one I know of is at UCLA, though it seems that theirs is a bit more on the theoretical side. There seems to be a fairly comprehensive wiki on the written comps, and Tamar Arnon (the assistant director for student affairs) has copies of the old written comps problems that are not already on the wiki. Tamar gave me a book of written comps problems when I was at Courant yesterday, so I might actually upload them onto the wiki. Here is the list of books I’ll be using to prepare for the exams:

  • Advanced Calculus
    • Walter Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis
    • Tom M. Apostol, Calculus, vol. 2
    • Tom M. Apostol, Mathematical Analysis
    • Michael Spivak, Calculus on Manifolds
    • James Munkres, Analysis on Manifolds
    • Wendell Fleming, Functions of Several Variables
  • Complex Variables
    • Stein / Shakarchi, Complex Analysis
    • Ahlfors, Complex Analysis
    • Needham, Visual Complex Analysis
  • Linear Algebra
    • Lax, Linear Algebra and Its Applications
    • Roman, Advanced Linear Algebra
    • Strang, Linear Algebra and Its Applications

Who Still Buys CDs?

 Music  1 Response »
Apr 082012
 

I’ve had a vague suspicion that my record-purchasing habits have been erratic for a while. Since I will be living off my stipend pretty soon, I am taking this opportunity to take a peek in my book and figure out what I have been doing. So, here are the numbers of records I purchased in each month, throughout my college career:

2008-2009 2009-2010 2010-2011 2011-2012 Total
June 4 0 0 1 5
July 2 0 0 1 3
August 3 0 0 1 4
September 0 0 0 0 0
October 0 0 13 4 17
November 5 0 0 1 6
December 0 3 0 3 6
January 0 1 0 8 9
February 0 0 4 11 15
March 0 9 4 0 13
April 0 0 2 N/A 2
May 0 17 3 N/A 20
Total 14 30 26 29 100

As it turns out, I do have a habit of splurging on records every once in a while. Both the May 2010 purchase and the October 2010 purchase were followed by a few months of no purchases, presumably to digest the large number of records that I hoarded. This trend continued to this date, since the 8 new albums in January and the 11 new albums in February were a part of “one big purchase” that I had planned.

Now, this is troublesome. After a big purchase, I find myself playing a few albums repeatedly and not giving the rest the attention they deserve. Once I buy more albums, a good number of these “lesser records” will rarely enter my playlist again. Perfectly good dollars are wasted. Worse, perfectly fine albums are left on the shelf to collect dust: some records I genuinely dislike, but many others I just need enough listens to get used to them. Of course, I simply cannot afford “enough listens” for every album, if I buy 17 records at once.

Here is the new plan: I will buy three records each month. That way, I will be able to listen to a few more albums each year, while learning each album more thoroughly. In fact, I went ahead and ordered three just now:

I might consider writing reviews later—but no promises!

Some Learning Oppurtinities in (Harmonic) Analysis

 ca.classical-analysis, MK Blathers  No Responses »
Apr 012012
 

My poor blog! I left it abandoned and barren for too long. I will try to post more regularly, though, as usual, I can’t promise anything.

I have been traveling in the past two weeks, visiting graduate schools and trying to decide where I want to spend my life for the next five years. I think it would be impolite to relay my impressions of the schools I visited on a blog, so I will resist the urge. Instead, I would like to share some information I have gathered at the visits that are of interest to fellow apprentice analysts.

On Friday, I learned that Professor Brett Wick at Georgia Tech is running the Internet Analysis Seminar, which, I believe, is on its third year. The idea is to collaborate on studying the basic material via the internet, and then to gather at a week-long conference to discuss the more advanced material. In a sense, it is fairly similar to Professor Christoph Thiele‘s Summer Schools in Analysis, except that Thiele’s summer school does not have the centralized coverage of the basic material that Wick’s seminar has. Indeed, Wick writes up lecture notes for the seminar, which can be found here and there.

Also, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has been awarded the NSF Research Training Groups grant in analysis. UW’s summary of the grant is as follows:

UW Math Professors Alexander Kiselev, Andreas Seeger and Leslie Smith have received an RTG grant from the NSF. The title of their grant is “Analysis and Applications”, and its approved budget is $1.8 million for 5 years. The funds are mostly for support of graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduate research. The proposal ranked first among RTG in Analysis submitted this year to the NSF. The grant involves faculty members in both analysis and applied mathematics groups.

I expect that UW will host many seminars, conferences, and workshops on harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and mathematical biology.

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