A picture of my colloquium

Thanks to the requests of Becca and Brent, and the photography of Sunmi, I here present you with a picture of my colloquium, all on one chalkboard. You should be able to get the gist, but I could write out an explanation for the parts I am covering, the parts that are hard to read at the end, and the parts I said aloud. If you click on the image, you can see Blogger's lame "large" version. However, I have hosted the original size version where you can read the writing on WSO.

25 divided by 5 is 14

Neal points us to a very clever video in which the preceding "fact" -- that 25 divided by 5 is 14 -- is proven in three different ways: long division, multiplication, and addition. I like this kind of "proof" and try to collect as many as I can.

A Web site about my crew boat

I spent a few hours making a Web site about my crew boat. It explains all the steps of the process, with lots of illustrations along the way. It also has a FAQ section, and while talking with Sunmi today, she actually asked two of the questions from the FAQ, so now I know that the Q really are FA. Also, the site is written in PHP. I will never write a web site in anything else, ever. It makes everything trivial except the content, which is really the way it should be. So please, check it out.

An elementary proof of Krull's Intersection Theorem

To do analysis on commutative rings, we need a metric, and to prove that the distance function we have is actually a metric, we need to show that it satisfies the three conditions for a metric. Two are easy to prove, but the third requires Krull's Intersection Theorem. Standard proofs of this theorem require advanced knowledge and complicated lemmas, but I'll explain a new, simpler proof that requires only abstract algebra.

Above you will find the title and abstract for my colloquium on September 25 at 1 pm. The proof is not mine; I will merely be explaining it. Feel free to come.

I finished my crew boat

I'd just like to point out that I finished making my five-foot model of a Williams crew boat. I've been uploading pictures of it over the past few weeks. So go ahead, look at pictures of my crew boat. I've even added descriptions. I'll be making a much more extensive explanation of all the pieces and parts sometime within the next month. Here are a few pictures to pique your curiosity:



If you click on them, you can see larger versions.

Classes for the fall

In addition to my thesis, here are the courses I am thinking of taking:

American Landscape History
Economic Development in Poor Countries*
Mathematical Modeling and Control Theory
Violence, Militancy, and Collective Recovery*

I have to choose between the two with asterisks, since I will only be taking one of them. Which should I choose? Opine freely, please.