Thoughts on Mechanics of Solids and Structures and Math Activities

My fourth class this past semester was Mechanics of Solids and Structures, or MechSolids, which is a mechE requirement. I also did a lot of math related activities. Compared to last semester, I didn't feel like I did very much math this semester, but what I did do was pretty varied.

Back at Olin

Being back at Olin is still a little weird. I'm living in a different dorm, and most of my friends have already gone through that adjustment. I'm in a double instead of having a large room to myself in a three person flat. I don't know a quarter of the school. (On the first day of one of my classes, the professor had us all introduce ourselves because "There's always that one junior who doesn't know the first years," and the other non-first-years pointed at me.) I'm not taking a math class, and I am taking four engineering classes. Olin culture is very different from BSM culture, and the Needham/Wellesley line is decidedly not Budapest. It's a lot to get used to, but it's been great to see people again, and I'm starting to settle in. Here's what I'm up to as far as academics this semester:

Reflections on Second Semester, Part I

This is the first of four posts looking back at the semester that just ended. The posts will be split up by class or activity. This post focuses on two of my four classes, Partial Differential Equations (PDE) and Waves.

Reasons I love Math

1. Different subfields connect to each other in awesome ways. I'm doing graph theory research this semester with a group on campus. Most of my graph theory experience is in one subfield (edge coloring), and the group does work in another subfield (vertex labeling). Within my first couple of weeks with the group, we solved a vertex labeling problem by changing it to an edge coloring problem and solving that, which I thought was really cool.

2. It explains weird phenomena. This past Saturday night was the first ever Midnight Mathematicians at which the speaker was a professor. Midnight Math meets every other Saturday night (ish) at 11:59 pm, and we all dress classily, eat cheese, and listen to someone talk about math! This weekend, Professor John Geddes talked about work he's done on nonlinear dynamics of fluids, particularly related to blood flowing in microvessels. The blood sometimes does weird things, like change directions with no change in conditions, and the mathematics can actually explain this, which is so awesome. (I in no way mean to imply that math is only cool if it is useful. I've done and enjoyed too much model theory and logic to think that.)

3. And finally, it leads to exchanges like this:
(In Partial Differential Equations on Friday, talking about the wave equation on the half line. Aaron is the professor.)
Student: "That's why we can't make a semi-infinite guitar!"
Aaron: "That's why we wouldn't want to. The finiteness of the universe is why we can't."

Traditional

My second semester at Olin started two weeks ago. I have a pretty traditional schedule this semester, which is a little odd after the fall. I'm taking Real World Measurements, Modern Biology, Partial Differential Equations, and Physics of Waves. Despite how traditional most of my classes seem from the titles, they're still very Olin-ish, just in different ways than my classes last semester were. The classes have each met several times now, so I'm going to go through each one below the fold.