Weekends are Wonderful Things

Last weekend was one of my busiest and most exciting since spring break, but in a lot of ways it was a pretty typical Olin weekend.

Saturday was Dewey's Read-A-Thon, the beginning of the NEWMAC baseball tournament, the last performance of Much Ado About Nothing at Olin, a Doctor Who episode with TARDIS, and my advisor Aaron's Midnight Math talk. On Sunday at church, we celebrated Earth Day, and I played handbells. Back at Olin, I had my second-to-last research meeting of the school year. More about each below the fold!

The Read-A-Thon started at eight am, and I woke up to start reading. Between 8 am on Saturday and 4 am on Sunday, I read the first four Ranger's Apprentice books by John Flanagan and Throne of Glass by Sarah Mass, and I reread about half of the first Hitchhiker's Guide book. I enjoyed the Ranger's Apprentice books and would have continued with book 5, but book 4 felt like it ended a story arc, and I wanted to read something different. Throne of Glass kept me up until four in the morning because I wanted to finish it. I'm very excited for the next book to come out in August.

Babson was the third seed in the NEWMAC baseball tournament. Their first game was against MIT, the second seed. MIT was home team, but they played at Babson, so I got to go watch. It was a very good, close game until the 8th inning, at which point MIT scored a bunch. Babson's next game (in the losers' bracket) was against Coast Guard. I watched that game online from my dorm room instead of staying out at the field; I wanted to read. Babson won pretty easily, so they survived to play again today. (Sadly, they lost to MIT again. But it was a great season, and I really enjoyed going to the games!)

At eight, I went to the closing night performance of Much Ado About Nothing which one of the seniors directed as her AHS (Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences) Capstone. (We have the option to do either a three course AHS concentration or a two course concentration with a capstone.) Much Ado is my favorite Shakespeare comedy, and several of my good friends were in the production, so I ended up going to three of the four performances. The production was excellent. It had been much too long since I'd seen Much Ado, and there are so many bits that I love.

TARDIS is the Doctor Who club at Olin. Every Saturday night that there's a new episode, we gather in a dorm room, project the episode onto the wall, and watch together. It's a lot of fun! I'm a more casual fan, but I really enjoy listening to the more serious members of TARDIS compare episodes to previous ones and discuss theories about various plot points.

Last Saturday night/Sunday morning was also the last Midnight Math of the year. Midnight Mathematicians occurs approximately every other Saturday night, and it starts at 11:59 pm. We dress fancily, eat cheese, and listen to math talks. Most of the talks are by students, but this past week my advisor, Aaron, talked about complex variables. It's really cool stuff, and he also tied in some of what we covered in PDE this semester, which made me happy. I stayed after with a couple of others to talk about various math and Olin things with Aaron, and that's always fun.

I got to church early on Sunday morning for handbell rehearsal! We played an arrangement of "This is my Father's World" for the introit, and then for the sermon response we played "God of the Sparrow" with the congregation singing along. It went really well, and I'm hoping handbell choir becomes more regular next year.

A few hours after getting back from church, I had a research meeting. I've been doing graph theory research this semester, and there was one more thing the group wanted to get done before summer. I've been working with Jacques, a junior, this semester, so we met to try to figure out this last piece. Our research is on L(2,1) labelings. Given a graph, we want to label the vertices with integers such that two adjacent vertices (vertices with an edge between them) have labels that are at least 2 apart, and vertices with are distance two from each other have labels that are at least 1 apart. What Jacques and I worked on last Sunday was labeling a particular family of graphs. We were worried that it would be pretty difficult, but within an hour and a half we had the full result we wanted.

Other than the Read-A-Thon, last weekend wasn't actually all that unusual. There's always a lot going on at Olin and in the Boston area on the weekends.