Category: Updates

I’ve been struggling a bit this week. Yesterday I forgot to do any math. Today I only watched YouTube videos.

Hopefully, things will improve. Last week I got a book of mathematical games for my birthday, and I want to read some of that in the next few days. I will share anything interesting I learn.

Today was somewhat busy again. I thought more about the proposition I’m attempting to prove. I came up with some new ideas, but didn’t have time to follow them through. I also read more of Infinite Powers.

I’m feeling better about this project after my long break. My mental health has improved, and thinking about math is less of a struggle.

Today I had multiple events to go to. A failure of time management led to my only being able to fit in a little reading from Infinite Powers.

I only did a little study today, but it is more than I have been doing for the past five weeks. I worked for a while on showing that 253 is prime, but didn’t make much progress with the proposition I was trying to prove. I will try again tomorrow.

I also started watching a video from the YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown. I wanted to think more about the questions it introduced, though, so I did not watch all of it.

My brain seemed a bit perkier today. I read more of the section on algebraic geometry in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics and found it easier to concentrate and understand than it has been. I had to quit before very long due to sleepiness, though. That is a known side effect of the medication I have recently started taking more of. There is hope it will wear off, however.

Today I read more of Infinite Powers, but I had a lot of trouble concentrating on it. Better luck tomorrow, perhaps.

I will be visiting my mother next week, and I have decided to take that time off study and blogging. There is some possibility I will take the following week off as well.

Today I finished my relisten of A Brief History of Mathematics and also read more of Infinite Powers. The final section of A Brief History discussed algebraic geometry in very general terms, which piqued my interest. So I went and read part of the summary of that topic in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics.

That book is really cool, with outlines of both the content and history of the subject. I am pleased finally to be getting some use out of it. It was a gift from my father soon after I left college and before I realized that math was no longer something I could do. I nearly got rid of it, along with all my other math books, at numerous points over fifteen years. I always held on, though, lugging a several shelf feet of math books through two interstate moves, and I am so glad now that I still have my library to draw on. The Internet is also a good resource, but most of the time it can’t match the organization, depth, or reliability of a book.

That said, I am still feeling mentally weary and struggling with this project. I am not sure whether to keep pushing or take time away. (I hesitate to do the latter, since I don’t know what the problem is and therefore have no evidence that things would be better after a break.) Possibly the change in medication that I started today will help.

Today I felt unwell, but listened to more of A Brief History of Mathematics.

Today was another sleepy day, but I listened to some more of A Brief History of Mathematics.

Today I watched another Numberphile video and read more of Infinite Powers.