I’m reading through Primes of the Form $x^2+ny^2$, by David Cox (it’s good!). Here are the high-level notes I took on the first chapter, which is about the theory of quadratic forms.

(Meta point re blog: I’m probably going to start posting more and more of these more high-level notes/sketches on this blog on topics that I’ve been just learning. Up til now I’ve been mostly only posting things that I understand well and for which I have a very polished exposition. But the perfect is the enemy of the good here; given that I’m taking these notes for my own sake, I may as well share them to help others.)

1. Overview

Definition 1. For us a quadratic form is a polynomial $Q=Q(x,y)=a{x}^{\mathrm{2\; \dots }}$

(This is a bit of a follow-up to the solution reading post last month. Spoiler warnings: USAMO 2014/6, USAMO 2012/2, TSTST 2016/4, and hints for ELMO 2013/1, IMO 2016/2.)

I want to say a little about the process which I use to design my olympiad handouts and classes these days (and thus by extension the way I personally think about problems). The short summary is that my teaching style is centered around showing connections and recurring themes between problems.

Now let me explain this in more detail.

1. Main ideas

Solutions to olympiad problems can look quite different from one another at a surface level, but typically they center around one or two main ideas, as I describe in my post on reading solutions. Because details are easy to work out once you have the main idea, as far as learning is concerned you can …

(Ed Note: This was earlier posted under the incorrect title “On Designing Olympiad Training”. How I managed to mess that up is a long story involving some incompetence with Python scripts, but this is fixed now.)

Spoiler warnings: USAMO 2014/1, and hints for Putnam 2014 A4 and B2. You may want to work on these problems yourself before reading this post.

1. An Apology

At last year’s USA IMO training camp, I prepared a handout on writing/style for the students at MOP. One of the things I talked about was the “ocean-crossing point”, which for our purposes you can think of as the discrete jump from a problem being “essentially not solved” ($0+$) to “essentially solved” ($7-$). The name comes from a Scott Aaronson post:

Suppose your friend in Boston blindfolded you, drove you around for twenty minutes, then took the blindfold off …

In this post we’ll make sense of a holomorphic square root and logarithm. Wrote this up because I was surprised how hard it was to find a decent complete explanation.

Let $f \colon U \rightarrow \mathbb C$ be a holomorphic function. A holomorphic $n$-th root of $f$ is a function $g \colon U \rightarrow \mathbb C$ such that $f(z) = g(z)^n$ for all $z \in U$. A logarithm of $f$ is a function $g \colon U \rightarrow \mathbb C$ such that $f(z) = e^{g(z)}$ for all $z \in U$.

The main question …

In Spring 2016 I was taking 18.757 Representations of Lie Algebras. Since I knew next to nothing about either Lie groups or algebras, I was forced to quickly learn about their basic facts and properties. These are the notes that I wrote up accordingly. Proofs of most of these facts can be found in standard textbooks, for example Kirillov.

1. Lie groups

Let $K = \mathbb R$ or $K = \mathbb C$, depending on taste.

Definition 1. A Lie group is a group $G$ which is also a $K$-manifold; the multiplication maps $G \times G \rightarrow G$ (by $(g_1, g_2) \mapsto g_1g_2$) and the inversion map $G \rightarrow G$ (by $g\mapsto {\mathrm{g\; \dots }}^{}$

More than six months late, but here are notes from the combinatorial nullsetllensatz talk I gave at the student colloquium at MIT. This was also my term paper for 18.434, “Seminar in Theoretical Computer Science”.

1. Introducing the choice number

One of the most fundamental problems in graph theory is that of a graph coloring, in which one assigns a color to every vertex of a graph so that no two adjacent vertices have the same color. The most basic invariant related to the graph coloring is the chromatic number:

Definition 1. A simple graph $G$ is $k$-colorable if it’s possible to properly color its vertices with $k$ colors. The smallest such $k$ is the chromatic number $\chi(G)$.

In this exposition we study a more general notion in which the set of permitted colors …

This post documents my adventures of getting the SysRQ key working on my Mac Mini and Macbook (both running Arch Linux). The suggestions of loadkeys and keyfuzz that are the first search entries don’t work for me, so some more sophisticated black magic was necessary.

Remapping the Fn keys

This step is technically optional, but I did it because the function keys are a pain anyways. Normally on Apple keyboards one needs to use the Fn key to get the normal Fn keys to behave as a F<n> keystroke. I prefer to reverse this behavior, so that the SysRq combinations is Alt+F13+F rather than Fn+Alt+F13+F, say.

For this, the advice on the Arch Wiki worked, although it is not thorough on some points that I think should’ve been said. On newer kernels, one does this by creating the file /etc/modprobe.d …

This will be old news to anyone who does algebraic topology, but oddly enough I can’t seem to find it all written in one place anywhere, and in particular I can’t find the bit about $\mathsf{hPairTop}$ at all.

In algebraic topology you (for example) associate every topological space $X$ with a group, like $\pi_1(X, x_0)$ or $H_5(X)$. All of these operations turn out to be functors. This isn’t surprising, because as far as I’m concerned the definition of a functor is “any time you take one type of object and naturally make another object”.

The surprise is that these objects also respect homotopy in a nice way; proving this is a fair amount of the “setup …

Hmm, so hopefully this will be finished within the next 10 years.

— An email of mine at the beginning of this project

My Euclidean geometry book was published last March or so. I thought I’d take the time to write about what the whole process of publishing this book was like, but I’ll start with the disclaimer that my process was probably not very typical and is unlikely to be representative of what everyone else does.

Writing the Book

The Idea

I’m trying to pinpoint exactly when this project changed from “daydream” to “let’s do it”, but I’m not quite sure; here’s the best I can recount.

It was sometimes in the fall of 2013, towards the start of the school year; I think late September. I was a senior in high school, and I was only enrolled in two classes. It was fantastic …

Here are notes for setting up DNSCrypt on Arch Linux, using pdnsd as a DNS cache, assuming the use of NetworkManager. I needed it one day since the network I was using blocked traffic to external DNS servers (parental controls), and the DNS server provided had an outdated entry for hmmt.co. (My dad then pointed out to me I could have just hard-coded the necessary IP address in /etc/hosts, oops.)

For the whole process, useful commands to test with are:

• nslookup hmmt.co will tell you the IP used and the server from which it came.
• dig www.hmmt.co gives much more detailed information to this effect. (From bind-tools.)
• dig @127.0.0.1 www.hmmt.co lets you query a specific DNS server (in this case 127.0.0.1).
• drill @127.0.0.1 www.hmmt.co behaves similarly.

First, pacman -S pdnsd dnscrypt-proxy (with …