[Title of Blog]

“Keep your chin up, and your head out of the clouds”

After a tiring few months, my Spring Break is here, and I am glad.  It’s a great opportunity to sit back, breath, and get my life back in order.  In the last two days, I’ve cleaned my room, caught up on classes, and went out with friends, all with such energy that I didn’t think I would still have, yet managed to find somehow.   I just hope I can carry through the rest of this semester with this!  Life with a clean room is unbelievably satisfying.  When I get up in the morning, I feel refreshed, like I’m finally put together right.  I guess I’m a sucker for order; but hey, that’s what civilization does, right?  Try to impose order, at least.  Well, at any rate, I’ll try harder to keep myself tidy during the year.  Maybe some real good can come out of it!

If you weren’t super duper friends with me in Freshman year, you might not know that I’m a huge Vienna Teng fan.  Well, her fourth album is finally coming out, and although I’ve already pre-ordered it, I couldn’t stand waiting anymore, and went and downloaded the thing.  I’ve pretty much been listening to it nonstop for the last two days, and, while the style is definitely different from that of her last three albums, it’s still beautiful, in its own way.  I don’t know why, but to me, Vienna Teng’s albums were never like other artist’s, where there were just a few tracks per album that you would look forward to listening to.  When she releases an album, you like the whole thing.

Currently: looking forward to making some music of my own.

I went to a talk yesterday, where a professor from U Chicago talked about a field that he was pioneering, Geometric Complexity Theory.  Apparently, using methods of Representation Theory and Algebraic Geometry, he was able to bypass the natural barriers to P vs NP that are plaguing computer scientists.

Listening to the talk got me very excited.  Not only because he claims that the problem can be solved at all, but because he got to it with some very advanced maths.  I can’t wait to take Algebraic Geometry and Representation Theory now, so that I might be able to understand his papers some day.

On the other hand, the room was full of Computer Scientists, with a few Mathematicians here and there.  You could tell that nearly no one could fully follow his talk.  Of course, that’s dangerous, because when you’re delving in a topic that’s the specialty of only a few, then you are in danger of being completely wrong, and with not enough people checking you, mistakes could be checked.  I’m afraid that as long as he kept on saying “through representation theory!” to the uninitiated masses back there, we would have bought anything.  But, hey, he seems credible.  I guess I can’t know until I read more of his stuff (or more on his stuff).

I have a small break right now from work.   There is a paper due soon, and a complexity problem set to write up, but there’s more cushion time for those, so it’s not too bad.  I’m in the reading room right now, and am going back to basics: reading wikipedia, reading my RSS, and trying to figure things out.  There is a lot to learn, but I think I can do it.  After all, if I think about it, the amount of knowledge I’ve gained since this time last year is just ridiculous.  There’s no reason why a similar jump can’t happen between this time this year, and next year.  Ai, one can only hope.

I’ll be leaving tomorrow afternoon for California, where I will stay for a day and a half before catching a red-eye back to Boston.  I’ll be interviewing with Facebook for a summer position(fingers crossed?), but more importantly, I’ll get to be in warm weather at last.  Cali better be sunny when I get there; I’m getting sick of the cold!