Today I did more exercises from the review of conics. Most of them concerned analyzing and graphing ellipses. It was still second year algebra all over again, but I was a little less bored than by the exercises with parabolas yesterday. I think I may have been bucked up by this intriguing 3Blue1Brown video about ellipses that happened to come up on my YouTube homepage last night:
I also did a little extracurricular reading today about the Goldbach conjecture and the related ternary Goldbach conjecture. The latter was recently proven by a mathematician called Harald Helfgott. I have not yet absorbed even the overall method of the proof, but I did understand that the abstract proof only applies to numbers greater than a constant $C$ that is very large in human terms yet small enough that all numbers less than $C$ can be checked by a computer. I thought that was interesting.
I didn’t know about Helfgott’s work. How cool! And as someone with family in South America, it’s great to see that a truly monumental problem was solved by a Peruvian.
I guess YouTube has decided you like math vids.
I have a special YouTube account now for watching math vids.
Watched the vid. Loved “squishification”. Also, “math is art”. Vid lost me about 7:05, but it was still quite lovely.
I’m glad you enjoyed it.