Kim Reece @kimreece@mathstodon.xyz

I'll be cleaning this up over the weeks to come, but in addition to looking for standard funding sources, I'm opening the tip jar.

https://www.ko-fi.com/feonixrift
https://www.patreon.com/feonixrift

I'm a math grad student, persistently cashflow-negative, trying to hold up the finances through my masters thesis before I can get into a phd (hence paid) position.

I plan to be more vocal with what I do, and contribute in other ways, but... Patronage of the sciences is a thing, right?

nb. I'm a digital note-taker so I'm not spending a tree on this -- although arguably the carbon footprint of an android tablet is worse. But the principle is the same.

More #LaTeX draft writing tricks,

\usepackage{setspace}
\doublespacing

I can't be the only one who had ream length print-outs in programming or English classes, corrected them by hand with lots of margin notes and inline scribbles with the text either double or _triple_ spaced, then typed in the corrections afterward.

If that's your edit flow, the normal dense script of LaTeX can get really annoying to annotate. So I started double spacing my drafts .. and my edit pace went up!

Does anyone have recommendations for online whiteboards? With or without collaborative features?

Or at least screen recording apps for android?

I would like to be able to stream my work on occasion, or at least create videos, or do virtual tutoring sessions. All of which is way more awesome with the right tools.

I cleaned up a lot of my writing today.

Then I spent a couple hours making another hopeful attempt at something involving generators differing by a square... All of which was grounded in yet another typo.

A typo I'd already caught days ago, and then somehow made again in a new way. Thank goodness for simple example cases. With no compiler, just pen and page, a test suite is my only hope.

Another attempted proof down the drain for a sign error, caught after more than a day of work.

Instead of a pleasantly applicable contradiction, I have only from it that an adjacent and likely irrelevant value is a square.

I wonder, after years of tutoring and running small groups, whether lecturing will someday be relaxing or just a different kind of stress?

At least then you get to pick the topic with a measure of fore-warning.

(Abstract algebra group that I offered to do started today.)

#LaTeX tricks,

\newcommand{\todo}[1][]{\marginpar[\(\to\) #1]{}}

\todo[cleanup]

This allows me to put margin notes for future edit locations.

When writing proofs, how do you tell whether your case structure is inherent or incidental?

It's common in algebraic number theory to end up in a massive number of cases, as fields intersect or don't in myriad ways. But cases can also arise simply due to weak techniques that only mostly work, to such an extent that I had professors at my old school who considered any proof with cases suspect. So how you do you tell these situations apart in practice?

One step back, two steps forward...

I'm still not happy with 'just take a power series over the uniformizer' because it glosses over that you need to pass to the local field first to get a discrete valuation ring before you can do that. But it basically comes out in the wash.

Yesterday (and several days prior) were a computer induced frustration -- turns out sometimes PARI hands you \(-\zeta\) for \(\zeta\). So no longer chasing that, I was finally able to apply the technique where I meant to.

Is there a way to tell #PARI that a variable is an integer?

I like getting expansions over complex values by default but I really need to simplify this.

It's 10:20am; the eduroam network has slowed to a crawl.

Carefully, in frustration, I perform a variable substitution... replacing each variable appearing in a selection of products with a different prime. Let the computer believe I mean numbers; I can extract the factors at the end.

Except for one, which appears in sums, so cannot be scrubbed away. Bravely the computer returns \[\frac{x}{(-1)^{2b}-1}\] where \(b\) is an integer.

Apparently, if I want results, I will be doing this by hand.

I'll be cleaning this up over the weeks to come, but in addition to looking for standard funding sources, I'm opening the tip jar.

https://www.ko-fi.com/feonixrift
https://www.patreon.com/feonixrift

I'm a math grad student, persistently cashflow-negative, trying to hold up the finances through my masters thesis before I can get into a phd (hence paid) position.

I plan to be more vocal with what I do, and contribute in other ways, but... Patronage of the sciences is a thing, right?