Wednesday, January 17, 2007

First Day, take 2

Yesterday didn't count, did it?

I mean, I only had one class.

I'm not sure why we bothered to start on a Tuesday. Weird.

Ah, c'est la vie.

We'll call today the first day of class, though, okay?

I've just wrapped up our first meeting of 280, our intro to proofs and other foundational aspects of mathematics. It went pretty well. It's at the perfect time of day, after the early-morning sleepiness has passed and before the lunchtime restlessness sets in. As a consequence, everyone (your humble narrator included) was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, awake and up to the challenge. We had a good ol' time building a theorem from scratch, and proving it. Based only on data suggesting that ODD + ODD = EVEN and so forth, we came up with a clean statement of the appropriate theorem, and we managed to prove one of its three prongs before the metaphorical bell rang. On deck for Friday: fun with quantifiers! Oh boy!

In half an hour my number theory folks meet for the first time. I'm looking forward to that one with eager anticipation. I had two more students enrol just this morning; it's a good thing I checked my rolls before heading over, I was able to print off a few more copies of everything.

Before I leave, here's a shout out to Nikola, up in Maine! Nope, no 0-degree weather here, sadly. I miss the cold. I did, however, and much to the surprise of some of my students, wear shoes to walk across the quad this morning.

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