Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

With the Christmas holidays been and gone, it is now time for another 8 weeks of non-much-free-time, bad dreams about problem sheets and undecided sleeping patterns – Hilary term is here.  And so far, it hasn’t been all that bad.

Alright, I’ll give that it started off badly with Collections.  That’s what Oxford (possibly also Cambridge?) calls their start-of-term exams that everyone takes.  I had two – pure maths (linear algebra and analysis) and applied maths (functional programming, calculus and probability).  Each were three hours long, and I did both in the same day – so 9am – 12 noon and 2.30pm – 5.30pm were not good times.  The pure one came first – it went markedly better than the applied – I think by that stage of the day I’d had enough with all this talk of vector spaces and convergent subsequences in order to deal with the foldr function, trigonometric substitutions and Bayes’ Theorem.  I got through it in the end though, and the weekend after the exams were over (exams were on the Friday of 0th week) was the best weekend ever.  We still haven’t, at the end of 1st week / start of 2nd week, gotten any results back yet, though I’m expecting them this week.  So yes, that should be interesting… Also, even though all the colleges seem to do the same exam, it is the college themselves who chooses whether they want to set Collections for their students or not.  So, while Keble is (surprise surprise) very big on the idea of giving exams to students at every turn (read: every term), other colleges seem to set Collections once a year or less.

Apart from that, 1st week seems to not be too bad in terms of workload.  New Analysis topics are never good, I have to get over this whole new epsilon-delta stuff again.  Too many symbols!  Oh yes, and apparently a uniformly continuous function is no longer one which you can “draw without lifting your pen”.  Oh no.  The new, “improved” definition is:

“Let f be a function with domain E (subset of the real numbers) to the real numbers.  Then f is uniformly continuous on E if for all epsilon > 0, there exists a delta > 0, such that |f(z) – f(x)| < epsilon for all z in E such that |z-x| < delta, for all x in E.”

And I totally wrote that down without looking it up in the lecture notes.  Get me.

Other than the maths, we went to see a film the Invariants (Oxford mathematics society) called Enigma which is about the codebreakers at Bletchley Park during WWII, and the historically inaccurate story of how they broke the Enigma code.  Bit confusing, too many subplots etc, but entertaining nevertheless.

This weekend I went with Charlotte to London to visit Jess, was a really fun day out – apart from getting up at 8am on Saturday morning and getting back to Oxford at 2am early Sunday morning!  We did normal touristy things – went to see Big Ben, the London Eye, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace… we also saw the entrance to Downing Street, but couldn’t go down it… must have thought we were terrorists or something. :S  Jess took lots of photos, you can see them here on her Facebook photo album.

Next week’s outlook looks alright – getting into the work flow now, and 2nd week shouldn’t be too bad compared with 3rd week when computing practicals start, and that’s nothing compared to 4th week, which looks to be the worst of the 8.  But that’s a long way off yet.