Caltech

Dabney Dress Dinner

Yesterday was Dabney's dress dinner which is where we get fancy food and a few of us wear fancy clothes. Every house gets one and the food is usually really good. I was just hired as a waiter for Dabney, so my first day consisted of waiting at the dress dinner. It was A LOT of work. Instead of just sitting around while my food was brought to me I carried trays of food in and out of the kitchen and got people drinks. I had a lot of fun, though. I also took a lot of pictures.

Lily, another waiter, is pouring water for some Darbs.

Kim, an alum, is feeding Remy.

"Tuna", a new sophomore waiter, brings around the menu and writes down who has the vegetarian option.

(Some of) Dabney's seniors (technically "ghosts") who just had their last dress dinner as students.

The seniors already finished their classes and are now getting ready to graduate. The majority of them are getting ready to go to grad school and move into their apartments in different cities and states. I'm going to miss them all.

Math Awards!

As you may or may not know, Caltech won the Putnam this year. So, the math department won a lot of money (well, a lot of money for a math department) and we got to have dinner at the Ath for free! The Ath is this fancy place on campus where professors, alums and grad students can apply for membership and eat really good food. Sometimes, we can go to the Ath if we're invited by a member or if there is an event there that we're invited to. Also, if you want to, you can take a professor to the Ath every term and ASCIT will pay for it.

Anyway, the math awards banquet was really fun. I didn't win any awards but I got to eat yummy food!

The people who won the Putnam for Caltech got fancy certificates, checks and some even got fancy medals

That's Yasha's award for helping win the Putnam. He also got at least one other award.

The awards banquet was really fun and it was another great opportunity for us to talk to faculty and mingle with other math majors and with the grad students. This week is the last week of classes and then I have to do finals so term is coming to an end.

My First Conference

I went to my first conference this Saturday. It was the Southern California Number Theory Day at Caltech. It was hosted by Dinakar Ramakrishnan, Elena Mantovan and Matthias Flach who are Caltech's Number theorists. There were four speakers who each gave hour-long presentations about their research.

It was a lot of math, but there were also breaks when everyone would socialize, drink coffee and eat refreshments.

I talked to some mathematicians about how I didn't understand anything that was going on but they said that it is still a good thing for me to go to talks and conferences. They also admitted to not really understanding what the speakers were talking about but I really doubt that they didn't understand.

After the conference, we all went out to dinner. We went to a Thai restaurant and the food was really good.

It is so great to interact with math faculty from Caltech and faculty from other universities. It was such a relaxed setting and I had a lot of fun at dinner. There were only two other undergrads there, but I hope in the future more undergrads participate in the conference and the dinner because it's a really great experience. Also, it really does seem like the faculty try to get undergrads to participate in activities where they can interact with each other.

Anyway, it's the second to last week of term! It seems more important than the second to last week of the first or second terms because after this term, I would have finished one whole year of Caltech! I am super excited but also very nervous for real grades at the end of term and SURF this summer. I only have two finals, but one of them is TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LONG! In one sitting, too. Math 5 (Abstract Algebra) was intense this term. Hopefully, I will end up doing well.

Ditch Day: Back to the Future!

Ditch day is tomorrow, but it was also on Friday and I had tons of fun. I signed up for the Back to the Future Stack but it turned out that it was a joint stack between my stack and the Star Trek Stack in Blacker. After we travelled through time, we found out that there were strange happenings in the universe and met up with the crew of the USS enterprise. We also saw some Hitchhikers along the way who we helped fight some aliens. Anyway, here is a video about all the things I did. I didn't film nearly as much of the stuff that I actually ended up doing because I was too busy having fun.

 

Anyway, I am really impressed by the seniors who made the stack (they are mentioned in the video). They built everything, made up the stories and made those awesome t-shirts. I can't wait until I am a senior so I can make a ditch day stack.

Alumni Weekend and the Science Museum

Alumni weekend was this past weekend. It's funny to hear all of the stories that the alums tell and to compare Caltech then to Caltech now. I happened to see the registration booths for the alums on my way across campus to get food.

Alumni weekend is a big deal around here. It's the only time of the year when Caltech opens the Science museum that almost none of us knew existed.

Yep, that's a real Nobel prize on display there. They have some awards and letters from a lot of famous people who have been here at Caltech.

 
The science museum also has some journals and displays of equiptment.

I didn't get to get a chance to talk to a lot of alums (only just a few) because I was busy with work and I'm sick (again). This time I think it's a cold or something. It's been sort of an unlucky term for me when it comes to getting sick, but I still have been having a lot of fun.

San Fernando Valley and Semana Latina

This weekend, I checked out a Canon Digital Rebel SLR from the library on campus (it's so cool that we can do that). I took it down to visit my friend's house in the San Fernando Valley. I took a lot of pictures of the mountains on my way there and back. I absolutely love the mountains here. I just can't get used to how beautiful they are even though I see them every day.

My friend's (Dylan) house had a lot of pretty flowers outside of it and he had three cats. One of them was friendly enough to let me take pictures of him. His name is Hook. In Chicago, we don't have as many flowers as there are here in California because the weather changes so much and so drastically. There are also so many flowers around the Caltech campus.

Dylan is a really funny guy. He's in the improv club and he is in the improv class here. The improv class is a student taught course taught by a member of Lloyd. Dylan used to have a huge ball of curly hair atop his head, but he cut it very short and it made everyone sad.

It was fun driving out to Dylan's house and seeing the mountains and meeting his cats.

 

On Saturday, there was a conclusion to Semana Latina. Samana Latina is a week where the club, Clases, puts together events during lunch and Chouse to celebrate Latino culture. Clases stands for Caltech Latino Association of Students in Engineering and Sciences. I always just missed everything they put together at lunch, so I couldn't take pictures or have any of the tasty free food, but I did try some food at Chouse and go to the conclusion picnic on Saturday. We had tacos, flan, pan dulce, horchata, and more! I love Mexican food so much. They even had a bouncy castle.

 

I used to do photography in high school so (as you can probably tell) I had a lot of fun with the camera this weekend. I think I will keep checking it out because I can't afford to get my own camera.

The Burrito Cannon and Grades!

Contest details

Hey everyone! I saw this and just thought that I would post it because I thought it was interesting. It's the Fleming Cannon covered in what looks like a burrito wrapper.

I just got my first midterm grades. Last term, I just got shadow grades, but these grades are actually legit. I am doing a lot better than I thought I was doing, so I guess that working hard is paying off. I hope I can raise some of my grades by the end of the term, though, so I will keep working hard and possibly work harder! It's also sort of a relief to see my grades for the first time. After two terms of pass/fail, I didn't really know what to expect when it came to grades but I guess I was worrying too much and it all turned out to be okay. Caltech is hard, but it's definitely doable and rewarding!

Other than that, I am really looking forward to Ditch Day. Everyone seems to be making more and more of a big deal about it as the term goes on and it's getting more suspenseful. It's really surprising that the seniors can keep the secret of when Ditch Day is for such a long time. I'm very impressed.

Cinco De Mayo!

I might have spoke too soon when I said that breakfast for dinner was the best thing ever. Tonight's dinner was really fun and really delicious. CDS (Caltech Dining Services) made homemade tortillas

There's some pan dulce there which was for desert. There were also churros for desert. We also had grilled steak tacos on these homemade tortillas.

Everyone got sombreros and had a pinata, too.

That picture is of everyone running for candy after the pinata broke. Dinner has been really good this week, but I promise I won't keep blogging about food. This week was just exceptionally good.

THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER!

Breakfast... For dinner! For some reason, CDS (Caltech Dining Services) sometimes does weird things for dinner. At Caltech, if you're on a board plan, you eat dinner with your house (family style) and some students designated as waiters bring food from the kitchens and bring you drinks and stuff. It's actually pretty neat. Anyway, we all saw "breakfast for dinner" on the menu for the week and it was probably mentioned in people's statuses on facebook this week as much as (if not more than) some recent news stories. Everyone was wondering what was going to happen and finally, we had breakfast for dinner and it was AMAZING. A lot of people were skeptical at first, but the food was really, really good. Yesterday's food was really good, too. It was chicken nuggests and chili mac with celery and carrots. Tomorrow will also be really good because it's going to be Cinco de Mayo and we're having dinner out on the Olive Walk! Oh yeah, did I mention that today's vegetables were BACON and SAUSAGES?! Just kidding, they were just listed in the column where vegetables are usually listed. The "vegetables" for tonight actually was fruit salad. I felt like I was at IHOP, but better and more convenient because it wasn't 4:00 am and I didn't need to find someone with a car.

I decided to take pictures of my food after I started eating some. Oops. It still looks delicious, though.

Someone else has a plate piled high with breakfast things.

A cup of maple syrup for...

Mini pancakes! They were super yummy.

Don't you just want to eat them up?

 

Anyway, I will be done with my last midterm today so after that I'll be less busy and able to post more often. Hopefully, tons of things will happen between now and when I have time to blog again.

Galois Theory and the Library at Night

Field theory makes everything seem so nice. We've worked through two terms of abstract algebra (Math 5) and we've finally come to the conclusion that the complex numbers are algebraically closed. It's really cool to think that just less than a year ago, I would not have thought that I would look through my abstract algebra textbook and make sense of things. Caltech is really hard but it's rewarding to take a step back and see how much I've actually learned. In Math 5, we're just starting Galois Theory and while I was reading, all of these things started to make sense in my mind about my SURF project. I finally understood some of the motivations for some (very small) aspects of the project. I was working in SFL (Sherman Fairchild Library) in a study room with some sophomores who are in Math 120 (Graduate Abstract Algebra) and studying for their Math 120 midterm.

The library is open 24/7 to students, so there are always people in it. I left at a pretty late time so there was only a few people there.

The second floor of the library has a lot of journals and moving bookshelves to store them in.

They're pretty fun to play with even though the math journals are in Millikan Library so I wouldn't need to actually use these to find journals.