New study group for me

Hello mathematicians, puzzlers, and other curious people!

This was going to be a video, but with the holiday related chaos I haven’t had the chance to sit down at my desk for long enough to record and edit it. Maybe I should start doing some little bits sitting in my car, but that’s just not how I roll.

So, I’m finished with my thesis (TBH: master’s, not PhD; while going on to a doctorate would be interesting I don’t know if it’s feasible) as in cleared the defense and sent a FINAL Final final version to the graduate office. Sooner rather than later, I’m planning to take my defense presentation slides, to be honest probably expand on them in places as I was pressed for time, and make some video clips for here, to show what I’ve been working on outside of paid work for the past year and a half.

Of course it could have been done in a year instead of a year and a half; part of the issue was the tendency the project had, that in my experience is common to a lot of research projects, to go fractal: the longer I looked at any part of it to try to figure something out, the more details I found that could be dug deeper into, so really it could have expanded to fit almost any amount of time. One thing I would have liked to look harder at is the applications; the kinds of things people are trying to figure out, and realize it has something to do with Lie algebras.

Through asking in the intro level physics part of a Discord server that’s set up for free-choice learning based on MIT OpenCourseware materials — and we still definitely need a better way than that — I stumbled into a Lie algebra study group that’s currently working their way through Lie Algebras in Particle Physics; this past Tuesday, I joined in for the first time, and I think it’s going to be a regular thing. Now let me be clear, I don’t know enough to be in this group: not only are they in the fourth chapter, so for a while I’m inevitably listening in and trying to catch up and pick up what I can, but also, having been an elementary ed major in undergrad I didn’t get to take the good science classes so that particle physics beyond the “electrons are outside the nucleus” level would be assumable background.

But the thing about a study group is there aren’t any grades, so it’s OK that I’m treading water and picking up what I can. It’s OK that other people in the group are learning different things from what I’m learning.

I’m still going to spend some more time — for I’ve spent some already — in the chapters I missed by joining late, and maybe that’ll make more things make sense as we’re going along; and I found some video lectures on quantum physics, which seems like it could help. Already I’ve found some things to fix in my notes, either a copying error on my side or the group member presenting got a formula out of order (in a non-commutative space, so that actually matters); I suspect there the lift is as much finding the glitch as the result itself.

Education is like a basement: you can finish it in the sense it’s usable for practical purposes and presentable enough that you can have people over without making excuses about the work in progress, but that doesn’t mean you never get a new lamp or move around the furniture.

Anyway, there’ll be related content drops coming out of this at some point, as I work on jailbreaking the knowledge and serving it up at the table everyone can sit at.

Calc You Later!