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I wrote 90% of this on Sunday but didn’t post because I wanted to do a full spring break recap. However, I’ve realized that I don’t want to write anything substantial so I guess I’ll just use this? I’m also starting to get uncomfortable with the massive amount of information in these blog posts.
I’ve also not been great about marking “Week #.” The last time I actually did that was with “Week 4: Sun 1/23 – Sat 1/29” in an earlier post.
Week 9: Mon 2/28 – Sun 3/6
Term Ends were pretty…interesting. Amusingly, there’s quite a strong correlation between how stressed I am and the amount of emotes I use in my discord messages.
Monday: History (Afternoon). I should’ve prepared more for the essay.
Tuesday: Physics (Morning). There was a LOT of arguing about how the final TEE should be formatted. The week before, Mr. G had put the following options to a vote:
1) just cumulative exam
2) just chapter test
3) chapter quiz + cumulative exam
And there was quite a hilarious debate where all the non-seniors who therefore still cared about grades voted for (3) to have another chance to improve their grade, all the seniors voted for (1) to minimize the amount of work. And me? I voted for (2), forming a tie :).
Wednesday: Modern (Morning). IH and I knocked our presentation out of the park. The presentations were *meant* to be 5 minutes, but ours was 5 minutes and Dr. Bardoe cut me off before I got to explain how GA(1,K) was the automorphism group of K[X].
Thursday: English (Morning). We watched Basquiat. It’s a decent movie about art (and drugs), but the low quality of the camera made it a slightly unpleasant viewing experience.
SRP (Afternoon). NS worked on the derivation over the weekend, so I was only the second person to get the derivation. After classes, CW and I went to Blue State Coffee.
Friday: Went to Wibisono’s reading group and learned about Langevin Dynamics. I’m amazed that I was able to follow everything except for a couple of measure theory remarks. This is mostly because I read the relevant papers before the reading group.
Winter Term Grades
This week ended with a good note when winter grades were released on the 6th. I’m not too inclined towards saying my actual GPA, but I’m also very hyped about the grades I got in the past winter. This is kinda expected because I *did* talk about how I sink way too much time into school in a previous blog post, but still quite nice. My winter term GPA is 0.13 higher than my previous overall GPA :)) This was mainly driven by getting a good history grade.
SPARC
I ended up staying up pretty late finishing up my essays for the 11:59 pm PDT March 6th deadline. I’m pretty proud of my solution to the technical problem, I spent a lot of time coding and simulating random conjectures while at Blue State Coffee on Friday.
Week 10: Mon 3/7 – Sun 3/13
The first half, Monday through Wednesday, was spent grinding out my NYTimes STEM Essay Contest essay. I wrote about AI learning to solve very hard competitive programming problems as well as IMO problems, and the new technique (transformers) that drove these breakthroughs.
Falling Apart
Every break, nearly without fail, my productivity falls apart after a week. I thought that this wouldn’t happen during the spring break because I have so much stuff to do and USAMO as soon as I get back, but nope, it still happened.
“I think originally I didn’t care, then I got rly hyped up, then I took Ls”
’22 person about last year’s RSI
I said this to RK, but I think I need to start thinking of applications as “essay contests where your background is slightly considered” instead of the naive notion I had before of “a way for you to demonstrate what a great fit you’d be for the program.” I’m not sure if this carries over to college essays, but for those, I’ll also have a lot more support and will be expected to get my essays done really early, so I don’t have to think as hard about that.
NYT Essay Contest
Very fun. Wrote about transformers. I was mainly doing it to talk about two recent developments:
https://openai.com/blog/formal-math/
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Competitive-programming-with-AlphaCode
I should write a post about transformers at some point, I feel like this machine learning architecture actually simulates human cognition pretty well.
Friday Reading Group – Barycenters!
My method of finding word midpoints with word2vec, minimizing d(a,m)^2+d(b,m)^2, is apparently the canonical way to find midpoints. In the reading group, Sinhow Chewi was doing a guest lecture on a generalization of Caffarelli’s Contraction Theorem, and he mentioned that you could take midpoints of probability distributions. I went up to him after the lecture and asked him how, and he said that it was usually defined as the “barycenter” minimizing the same equation as I mentioned before, with the Wasserstein metric as the distance function.
CDB Meetup (NYC) on Saturday 3/12
Everyone met up at Frames Bowling in NYC (Manhattan?). This was the first in-person CDB event I’ve ever been to due to covid, and it was cool getting to know them. Unfortunately, the one person I knew before, DC, dipped to go to some Julliard thing smh.
Math – USAMO on 3/22 and 3/23
I also took APMO on the 14th, I can’t talk about it for a long time though 🙁
STEM POTW
I’m also quite proud of the most recent STEM POTW. I read that the fastest way to calculate pi is probably with Chudnovsky’s, which made me wonder if a Monte Carlo simulation was the slowest. I’ve found the time complexity of a Monte Carlo simulation but I haven’t looked into slower methods yet so let me know if you find any.
