Monday, September 29, 2008

Lubin ftw

*he is holding a marker vertically* "Is this marker a non-negative integer? No, it's a 1." *changes how he's holding it so it's horizontal* "How about now?"

"One of the great achievements of mathematics: we're going to give a precise definition of 'almost.'"

"This is almost so simple that it's kind of confusing."

"That encourages people to confuse intersection with conditional probability."

"If I write something down and it's wrong but it's obvious I mean the right thing, then that's fine. If you write something down and it's wrong but it's obvious you mean the right thing, then... ehhh it might be okay, we'll see. Now, I don't know if that's politically correct, but that's the way it is because I make the rules."

"If you have sixty-five people, then six and a half of them are left handed. How does that work? I think you have six people who are left handed and one who's ambidextrous. Is someone who's ambidextrous counted as left handed or right handed or both or half and half? If it's not easy to tell you should just ignore them because it really doesn't matter. ...Unless you're studying it, then it's important."

"Before today we would have made our sample space: HH, HT, TH, and TT. But now we just say, 'Obviously they're independent...'"

"Suppose we have two urns. You have 7 red balls and 3 blue balls in it." *writes 7B* "No, red is R. Seven red." *rewrites 7R* "And three black..."

*later in the above example* "If you got a red coin, you either got a red coin from urn one or a red coin...ball from urn two."

"We say, 'No, comma, unless one has a probability of zero.'"

"Ya got one pound of probability."

"Is that a picture of an urn? Or a 'U' for 'urn'?"

"...Well if you know which urn you're in..."

"Integrate to infinity. 'To infinity' means 'to one.'"

"If you pick a number, you can put it on the table or throw it in the garbage. Who cares about replacement? You can even eat it if you want to. I don't care."

"I'll assume everyone here can integrate by parts. I'm a big fan of integration by parts."

"I'm not going to assume you remember all this stuff from calculus I, and I'm not going to assume you're together enough to go review this stuff for fifteen minutes, but I am going to assume you're grown up enough that I can blame you if you don't review it."

"If you're short on time and it's easy like this, don't evaluate it. If you get more interesting integrals though... integration by parts maybe, remember I like integration by parts."

"I was derrogatory towards the inverse tangent function for many years... and I feel bad about it now."

"Here the thing is not the pdf, it's the pdf."

Sunday, September 7, 2008

I wonder what his children will be called?

While discussing acquaintance graphs:
"This is Al and Bobby and... Ching, and D, and E, and F. They are all people"

Friday, June 13, 2008

Prepare! The Y-Combinator Comes!

Remember this when the Y-Combinator comes, O wicked nation:
His work lasts an eternity. He will never allow thou rest, and thou canst not escape him. Prepare thyself now with a base case, lest thou be caught also in his eternal scheming.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Y combinator

"Run! The Y-Combinator is coming! He has recursion! He never stops! He never gets tired! He just keeps going!"

And out jumps the hero, "Everybody calm down! I have a base case!"

We're going to propose the deal to Marvel shortly.

Monday, April 7, 2008

A lemma in a hat.

"I'm going to pull this lemma out of nowhere."


-Pelsmajer, while proving the Polya-Redfield Theorem.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Why not to argue with your professor when he's right.

A: [Some absurd argument]
B: I deal in theorems and proofs, not matters of faith.
A: What?
B: In short, we differ.

The Mitillos-Ventullo Lemma

Discovered after Pelsmajer told them to fight to the death after class, the Lemma has a wide variety of uses, despite the inelegance of brute force proofs:

Lemma
: I am right.

Proof: Challenge me. QED

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Time complexity isn't nerdy.

A: "Yeah. It's not divisible by any primes through 29"
B: "You're a nerd."
C: "You're one to talk."
B: "I'm not as big of nerd as he is; I'm on the order of log(n)."

Thursday, March 27, 2008

JLR

"Uhhh....you've uncovered what I was hoping to sweep under the rug."

"Oh. Well that's fine, you can sweep it."

...

"It's in JLR random graphs, page 68.......roughly."

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

U = [a1 a2 .... an]

"You are a whole bunch of points."
"No. I am a strange loop."

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

As seen on TV!

Bezier's Hermite Poisson: gets rid of your Spline problems.

-Anne

up, down?

"Which way's down??? This way, right?!?"

-Pelsmajer

"Ramsey Theory...

basically says that there can never be complete disorder...
Sometimes."

-Pelsmajer

Thursday, March 6, 2008

ParabUla

It's the way he remembers what shape it is....