# Little crocodiles

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

L.C.
***
I love this poem it’s so.. endearingly morbid.

been doing a math set with various people over the weekend and have discovered a really simple problem that sudesh and jing yee were somewhat stumped by. it’s really strange, since they are both far more brilliant than anything i can ever aspire to be, and BOTH of them couldn’t quite get it. maybe it was too easy, the kind of problem that is designed for the simple minded (i.e. me) to feel better about my ineptitude via.
the question was as follows:
Let $\{z_n\}$ be a sequence of complex numbers and assume
$|z_n - z_m| < \frac{1}{1 + |n - m|}$, for all $n$ and $m$.

Show that the sequence converges.
Do you have enough information to evaluate $\lim_{n \to \infty} z_n$?
*** Gah wordpress doesn't allow me to enter the text environment since it automatically invokes the math environment in $\LaTeX$. which i suppose makes sense i'm not writing a paper but still!

it's strange how so many students around me view their expensive textbooks in terms of their buyback rate at the cornell store. when a book is expensive the first thing i think of is how valuable it must be, that (presumably rational) people are willing to pay that much to read it. it's like buying something really expensive like a pair of shoes or a first edition or a piano- things i really ought to treasure and to hold on to. instead of selling it back! those poor authors. i have kept every single book i've bought for all my lessons. after all, if you choose courses you're really interested in why wouldn't you want to keep the textbook?? for future reference, for leisure reading, for when you are old and married and have too much time on your hands you can reread 'em all. so i have books on german fairy tales, on writing, on the physics of sound, on the history of western music, on boats :D, on the new testament, on sociology, on the psychology of language, and of course all the math books. no way am i selling any of it.

I’ve realised that a lot of my classes are very polarised in terms of gender. Both my FWS were 99% female, i’m usually the only girl in my math classes, and my italian class now has only one boy (they were always in short supply but this is the first time there is -just- one). signore lynch. the poor boy’s stuck in a class of giggling girls, and a lovely simpatica dott.ssa who whenever we encounter an actor in the tb (e.g. gregory peck in vacanze romane) goes “non era brutto, eh? davvero non era brutto…” i wonder what he thinks of all this rampant fangirling in classe. :P today she was teasing him about being una rosa tra le spine and he turned bright red and all us ragazze were laughing at him which only made it worse. hehe.

I hate it when professors present the “wrong way” of looking at things followed by the “right way”, especially when the wrong way is so far fetched/irrational it would never have occurred to me until it was presented. why can’t they just home straight in on the correct way instead of crowding out my brain with completely irrelevant and incorrect information? i don’t particularly want to know what’s incorrect if i’m starting out with a blank slate, and giving me both sets of information means i also need to store an extra parameter to define one as true and the other as false. it’s so obvious when they’re trying to take up time.

the new chimes compets are so cute! i went down to open the door for the info session today and there was a whole circle of them waiting expectantly on the ground floor. my eyes widened in surprise at the sheer number of people (considering barely anyone tabled in this weather :P) and they all beamed at me! demo-ed the evening song and bach’s dbl vln concerto and also part of the alma mater variations which was pretty fun. round 2 tmr :) hope we get some boys in this batch, since we’re graduating both our boys this yr. boys are useful, can haul stuff up the tower :D although i guess given our vocation all of us really have comparable muscle mass.

Annunci

## 3 pensieri su “Little crocodiles”

1. ze ha detto:

how DO you find the time to post so much stuff? as it is, i’m still reeling from my overnight wrestle with marie de france… fell asleep in the olin stacks just now and left a nice little puddle of drool :P the stacks are so quiet at night! but i digress…

right now this is providing me with a wonderful excuse for procrastination, so i shall indulge myself for a while :)

isn’t carroll lovely? (i mean, not in a “lovely” lovely way, although he is sometimes that too…) justin came to look for me for some whimsical poetry to bring to his FWS class, and i gave him carroll and eliot (old possum’s book) but i hope he chooses carroll :P

i’m not sure if i’m interpreting the question wrongly, but i seem to get the conclusion that all the zn are one and the same point. cos z-infinity converges both around z1 and z2 (and any zn, for that matter), so they have to be the same point?

and aren’t you glad people sell back their old books! so we can buy them! blessed is the man who’s meat is everyone else’s poison, for he shall never go hungry…

2. tantpis ha detto:

How? I post a la Teasdale:
My heart is heavy with many a song
Like ripe fruit bearing down the tree,
But I can never give you one —
My songs do not belong to me.

Yet in the evening, in the dusk
When moths go to and fro,
In the gray hour if the fruit has fallen,
Take it, no one will know.

wotcha doing in the stacks at night? research? and well done with the constant sequence yes $z_\infty$ converges to any $z_n$.
okay go away i really need to start combi lol. if not be useful at least type some answers in yr comments ma then at least i’m distracted by relevant things :P

3. ze ha detto:

haha i like that. my branches are still empty, tho… there should be a study on the effect of sleep deprivation on fruiting trees… oh wait, trees don’t sleep…

i was in the toilet paper section (apparently “PQ” is short for toilet paper in French, and it so happens to be where the french lit is kept). ending up researching the contours of my eyelids… lol

i could post H_{12} here… totally useless, but how many blog comments have matrices in them? :P and srsly you hadn’t started combi at 7pm?? i spent the whole late afternoon whacking at it, and still haven’t finished… and it made me totally zoned out for discussion… nothing went in and i should’ve just slept… gah. haha ok i shall go away. just dropped by to steal some fruit ;P