And another day has been vanquished by me. Woo hoo!
I was really tempted to skip finance this morning. Like... really really tempted. My stomach was very displeased with the torture I put it through yesterday (Mexican for lunch, tacos for dinner, queso dip and jalapenos for a snack) and I was tired. My alarm went off at 6:30 and I hit the snooze. Three times. Then I resent my alarm for 7. At 7 I woke up and just waited for a minute, hoping that I was get a sudden urge to be productive and go to class. The urge never came. But I decided to get up, if for no other reason than to collect my quiz and tell Dr. Foley that I won't be in class on Friday because of FM (and hopefully he will have some mercy on me). Investment was definitely not worth getting up this morning. I think about a third of the class was absent. It was really funny because at the beginning of class Tim and I were talking about what we might talk about in class. We were just trying to be absurd, so Tim says "I bet we're just going to plot some lines on a graph." You can probably guess where this is going. 20 minutes into class we're plotting some lines on a graph*. It was pretty funny.
*Explanation of humor: generally plotting lines is seen as an activity for elementary algebra. So the it was funny because you don't normally spend much time on that in higher level courses, as it is seen as "trivial work**."
**The concept of things being trivial is additionally comical to mathematicians. You see, math text books and lectures are often chock-full of theorems and proofs of those theorems. It is very (far too) common for a math text book to have a something of this nature: "Let f and g be in R[a,b]. f + g is in R[a,b] and the integral from a to b of f(x) + g(x) dx = integral from a to be of f(x) dx + integral from a to b of g(x) dx. The proof of this is trivial and left as an exercise for the reader." This is from my Real Analysis course last spring. Hint: it is not trivial at all. Not even close. However, it is very very common for a book to say that a proof is "trivial" or "obvious," then never show the explanation. What's funny about that is in my Technical Writing class, Dr. Noonan informed us that if we ever saw that in a journal article, there was a good chance that the writer new that the beginning and end results were correct, but never actually bothered to do the work to prove it. Which I think is kind of funny. Regardless, saying that something is "trivial" is usually funny to mathematicians in a very ironic or sarcastic way. Similarly, a common joke among people who know some math history is to say that "I have an elegant proof, but the margin is too small to contain it.***"
***This is a reference to the classic, 300 year puzzle known as "Fermat's last theorem," in which amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat came up with a "proof" for the theorem x^n + y^n =/= z^n for n greater than 2. Fermat then died before he could ever write the proof down. For 300 years this theorem went unsolved. Many mathematical institutions held large prizes for anyone who could solve this. It wasn't until recently (1990s, I believe) that renowned mathematician Andrew Wiles solved this after 7 years of dedicated work. The proof ended up being nearly 200 pages and involved mathematics that Dr. Wiles had to formulate**** to make the theorem possible. So it is largely speculated the Fermat did not actually have a proof for this conjecture, and simply thought he did.
****Wiles did not actually create the mathematics needed. You see (I haven't taken the time to Google my facts, so these are largely from a class I had a year and a half ago, so the details are fuzzy), a little bit before Wiles began work on Fermat's last theorem, there was a pair of Japanese mathematicians working on a conjecture (something which has yet to be formally proved), called the Tatniyama-Shimura conjecture (for those were their names). However, after working on this conjecture for so long they abandoned their work and Tatniyama committed suicide (not uncommon among mathematicians creating new areas of math, sadly*****). The Taniyama-Shimura conjecture rested on Fermat's last theorem being correct, and vice versa. So Wiles actually proved the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, thereby proving Fermat's last theorem.
***** Georg Cantor was a mathematician who is credited with first suggesting that there are multiple levels of infinity. For instance, the first level deals with the number of integers (numbers like 3, 28, -831). There are an infinite number of them. However, Cantor believed that there were more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are integers. Therefore, there must be TONS of numbers if if you included all the integers and all the decimals in between integers. For this idea, Cantor was put into an asylum and died alone and poor. Next up we have Alan Turing, genius who cracked the Enigma code during World War 2. He also shares a birthday with me! The German army had this incredible device that allowed them to send coded messages to other Germans that were virtually impossible to decipher without the proper receiving machine (the code was sent and received on encoding/decoding "Enigma machines"). After a brave mission to board a German sub and acquire an Enigma machine (I think that is based off of some old movie I watched with mom and dad... no idea if that's fact or not), Alan Turing used his theory of involving the Turing Machine and its Infinite Ticker Tape, Turing was able to crack the Enigma code, which was one of the Ally's greatest tools for counter-intelligence against the Germans. As a reward for his dedicated service for his country, Turing was found guilty of the crime of homosexuality and chemically castrated. Turing ended up committing suicide out of shame and hopelessness.
Huh. That was quite the tangent (I promise that's my last math joke). This is pretty much how my mind works. While life is going on, this sort of thing is running in the background. I could seriously talk about this all day and not get bored of it. So if anyone ever wants a math lesson that starts in algebra, runs through the important parts of calculus, set theory, probability theory, finance, and makes frequent stops in math history then just let me know. After Friday I'll have some free time.
Anyhow. The rest of my day. Wow, I literally have just gotten through 9am. Um, Tim, Paul, Timbo, and I went to the Atrium. Today was definitely a coffee day. We worked through some FM problems. I was able to help explain some of the concepts involving comparing option profits. During life con was started a new topic today which seems really interesting. We started to discuss the "multiple decrements model." This means that instead of simply looking at death as a way of exit, we examine different ways of dying and various ways of exiting, or of "a status failing," as we like to say. Always distancing ourselves from the reality of death, as it makes things less morbid and our job easier. For instance, when dealing with insurance one need not necessarily die to acquire the benefit. There are other ways (liquidation, retirement, quitting, disability) that a company must consider. So it is the actuary's job to discern the likelihood of these events occurring given current modeling data. So I'm pretty excited to learn more about this.
After class I came home and had some lunch. Then I worked on FM for a while. I had a really difficult time studying today. I only made it through... about 23 problems. Bleh. I found a new website with questions from past exams. I've found that the questions are similar to ones that I've had, but it's difficult to focus because they don't change up the topics. Normally on the exams, two consecutive questions will rarely be on the same topic. But they purposely order the questions on this website to align with the Actex study manual. So after 12 interest questions... I just get bored and want to move on. It's good to get the practice of all the different ways that a question could be asked, but I just found it difficult to stay focused without a change.
And that was most of the rest of my day. I also did some dishes. I realized that my dishwasher really is garbage and hardly washes dishes. And the garbage disposal really does nothing. I need to call maintenance. I have to use tongs to get food out of the sink, otherwise it will start to smell like food because apparently it's just sitting in the sink after getting ground up. I'll try some of my sink declogger and see if that does anything.
Ok. I'm pretty tired and I'm sure you're all ready for me to end my math lecture. So good night!
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