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.
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