"As I told you, I have no idea how to prove theorems, so we will suppose it is not true and hope for the best." - Professor Komjáth

Midterms have started!

The first was geometric graph theory. Now leading up to this midterm, we all agreed that we had no idea what to expect. After the midterm, we all agreed that it was definitely not what we were expecting, despite the fact that we did not know what to expect. The problems were actually much easier than I was expecting, but because of this it kind of threw me for a loop and had me constantly second guessing myself. Combined with the fact that I feel like I am good at graph theory mostly because I am persistent, not because I see what to do quickly and that writing things up well and quickly is challenging for me, I'm really not sure how I did on it. I'm not really that worried about it, I just feel like I ought to have been able to do better (of course, I still don't have it back yet, so we will see).

Yesterday was the Conjecture and Proof midterm. I'm quite happy with how it went. The problems were fun and the sort of clever that I am coming to expect from this class.

This morning I had the Topics in Geometry midterm. It was another one that really had more questions that I would say a test with its length of time should have, but it also had questions that honestly did have rather short, easy to write up answers, so I am fairly confident about it :-). Class periods here are two hours. We had the test for the first hour and then an introduction to Spherical Geometry for the second half. Since next Thursday is a holiday, they are giving us next Friday off, which means that tomorrow is next Friday. This means that I have two hours of Geometry tomorrow and then another two on Monday. It should be exciting, expecially since we are going to try to cover everything we are doing for spherical by the end of class on Monday!

Set Theory has not had a midterm yet. Set Theory has not scheduled a midterm yet. I have no idea whether Set Theory will have a midterm or not. The class amuses me endlessly. Theoretically, we are supposed to be meeting every Wednesday. We had class on October 3, and then not again until this past Wed, but we also met on Friday this week. On Wednesday, Professor Komjáth started class with "As usual, I will not be here next week. I think we will have class this Friday instead" (the class was originally a 2 days a week class, but got switched to 1 when there were only 4 of us - Friday was originally a normal class day). Thus we had set theory twice this past week, and Bridget and I are planning to meet on Sunday afternoon to go over the handouts he passed out today and make cookies. It should be fun. Aside from the fact that the class has no schedule, Professor Komjáth has a wonderful subtle sense of humor and the material is fun. We spent the last two class periods on Ordinals. We have defined what it means to "add one" to an ordinal (which is defined as the order type of a well ordered set) , proved that the class of all ordinals is not a set, and introduced the concepts of transfinite induction and recursion. Oh, and once we had already done all sorts of stuff with ordinals he decided that we should actually give a formal set theoretic representation of the ordinals... As he put it "I never said my classes are non-contradictory."