After the awards ceremony, the group of Mathcampers
went back to Random for a while, and on the walk there, I had the chance to
talk to Stephen Wolfram. His daughter was competing, and she’s MC12, so he was
trying to figure out when we were doing what and where we were going to be. We
talked a little bit about Olin (evidently he was on campus a couple of years
ago), which was really cool. Once we got to Random, GW, who lives there and
was MC ’09, ’10, ’12 and RSI ’11, gave a tour to the people who hadn’t spent
much time in Random. I sat in the kitchen with Brigitte on her floor and did
some Art of Problem Solving grading.
We met in Lobby 7 at 5:45 and gathered a group of
around 30 Mathcampers to go to Bertucci’s, a pizza place. I got to talk to some
people I haven’t seen for a while, and I had a really good calzone. We
definitely made good use of the Round Table Theorem (if there are n people
seated around a table, there is always room for an n+1st person).
Back to Random again! This time we went into the
main lounge, which is on the first floor, and we played board games (more
Bananagrams!) and sang songs. The singing started with the Mathcamp song,
“Nonabelian,” and then continued from there to all kinds of things, including
“Finite Simple Group of Order Two” (one of my favorites), “Future Soon,” songs
from Dr. Horrible, and some Disney songs. The number of us there dwindled as
the night went on, and so around midnight when a group of people left to go on
adventures around campus, there were six of us left. We went upstairs to watch Fermat’s Last Tango. It’s a musical
about Andrew Wiles (though it doesn’t use his name), and we didn’t watch the
whole thing – once we started trying to figure out where it fell on the xkcd
bad movie curve, we decided to stop watching. After that we talked, meatloafed,
and played French Toast. Brigitte and the other volunteer staying with her went
to bed after a while, but there were four of us up for a very long time. It was
just so Mathcamp-like, not the active and crazy and really memorable moments,
but the quiet ones. It’s like mealtime conversations. So often afterwards I
don’t remember exactly what happened, but it was so peaceful and comfortable
and right.
I am a Mathcamper, and this weekend was wonderful,
but it made me miss Mathcamp so much. In Anthro, we talk about places versus
spaces. A space is the physical location with all the objects there, but the
place is everything related to people and culture that is embedded in a space.
I never quite had these words for it before, but since the end of MC10 I’ve
thought that Mathcamp was a place that wasn’t tied to any particular space.
There are spaces I associate with Mathcamp, and Random does lend itself to a
sense of Mathcamp, but wherever Mathcampers gather, I think a sense of Mathcamp
is possible. It’s a community, its own world in a way, and it’s comforting to
be able to remember that this community exists.
On Sunday, Brigitte and I got up in the late
morning. She had somewhere to be at noon, so I packed and left around 11:00. I
was meeting 2011 Rickoids at Toscanini’s (nicknamed Tosci’s) for ice cream at
2:00, so my plan was to sit in the W20 and work for a couple of hours. On the
way to the W20, I stopped at Flour Bakery for a grilled Portobello sandwich –
grilled, mushrooms, cheese, tomatoes, and pesto sauce. I can’t really imagine a
better sandwich, and it alone would be enough to make me love Flour. (They also
happen to make delicious desserts, but I didn’t get any because I was going to
Tosci’s later.)
A few hours later, I was the third Rickoid to arrive
at Tosci’s. This reunion was organized by one of the girls at Harvard and
something like 24 of the 2011 Rickoids are at Harvard, but among the first
eight people to arrive there was only one Harvard student. The other six were
all from MIT. In total seventeen people ended up coming. We mostly talked about
classes and clubs, but it was cool to see everyone and eat excellent ice cream.
It was really interesting for me to hear how the
Harvard and MIT students talked about their classes. A common question that
they asked each other was, “How are the psets?” Pset is a shortened form of
problem set, and almost all of the work in the science, math, engineering, and
economics classes my friends are taking is in pset form. The verb “to pset” is
used commonly, and pset parties definitely happen.
My classes don’t assign psets.
The closest I come to psets are ModSim diagnostics.
Diagnostics usually involve coding something, and they’re mostly to get us used
to MATLAB so that we can do our projects well. The projects are the point, and
the diagnostics are just there along the way so that we can actually do the
project. Similarly, the pre-labs in ModCon involve some calculations and
solving problems, but they also involve drawing massive circuit diagrams. The
whole idea is to be prepared for the lab.
Psets do happen at Olin. There are some classes that
lend themselves better to psets than anything else. None of those are first
semester classes, though. At the earliest, they’re in the second semester, and it’s
very unlikely that a student will have a semester that is all psets and essays.
There’s almost always at least one project based class.
It’s the sort of difference that’s really important
to how Olin operates and of which I was very aware, but once I got here I kind
of forgot about it until I was back in a context where problem sets were
normal.
I went home on the 4:30 commuter rail from South
Station and was back at Olin before 6:00, exhausted and with way too much work
still to do, but very happy.
It was a little funny – on the way to Cambridge, I’d
been so excited and had been thinking
of it as going home in a way, and it was. This weekend was all about the
communities of which I am a part – Math Prize, Mathcamp, RSI. I already really
miss the people I saw this weekend. Nevertheless, I had the same sense of going
home as I boarded the train in South Station to go back to Olin. I was ready to
be back in my own room in my normal routine.
It’s a blessing, I think, to have many homes, even
if there is always something to miss.
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