Education in a small town

The Easter Term started two weeks ago. It is the last term of this academic year. Many students were to hand in various projects. For me and my colleagues mathematicians it was CATAM (Computer-Aided Teaching of All Mathematics). I could choose to do four out of approximately twenty-five projects. I would like to spend this summer studying graphs, so I picked the projects relevant to this.

Except for two projects from Graph Theory, I went for other two from Number Theory.

I enjoyed most of all of them, but I liked The Continued Fraction Method for Factorisation more than others. It is generally accepted that the problem of factoring large number is difficult. Many cryptographic systems are built
exploiting this. There are however situations when you can find factors quickly. And even in general setting this method is way faster than straightforward trial division.

The other project building on courses Number Theory and Number Fields is Reduction of Quadratic Form. Which numbers are sum of two squares? This question is closely related to complex analogue of integers. A natural generalisation, which also has high relevance to number theory, is “Which numbers are of the form ax²+ bxy + cy²?”.  A particular case of this question was answered in the courses mentioned above.

During my stay in Czech Republic I had an opportunity to give a brief presentation about Cambridge University for UBES. UBES (Uhersky Brod Educational Society) is recently founded society. It is a platform, which allows people to meet and learn. Meeting consist of few short talks. The invited speakers can choose the topic they want to present. So far there were two such meeting with total of six talks. Topics included Introduction to Blacksmithing and The Function of the Metaphor in Language. Despite being so new, the project maintains a decent level of professionalism. In particular all talks are recorded and published. The first few meetings were open to a small group of friends. Now, once the concept proved to be interesting, the organisers decided to open the society to a larger audience.

Back to Cambridge. The Easter Term is unlike the usual term. There are no lectures and supervisions are focused on past exam papers.

I prefer to study in my room. A visit to a library makes this even more definitive.

Many libraries switched to 24/7 unless they did a long time ago. An exception is the library of my college. Apparently, they want their student to sleep as well. The fear that they wouldn't otherwise is confirmed by recent lunatic behaviour. The water fight in the library.

 

More blog articles

All news