Hope for the World

Yesterday, I went canoeing with a couple of other people from the REU. About an hour into the trip, we encountered a very large storm that was blowing us everywhere, making it very difficult to maneuver the canoe. We decided to pull off onto a bank in Deerfield Park because we didn't want to die of electrocution. However, we didn't have any safe place to go and were miles from the canoe rental place. A man named Chris had been biking and had seen us earlier. He told the park ranger that there were some people out on the river. Now, most people would have been content to stop at that and feel they had done their civic duty. Chris, however, drove around in his truck and continued to look for us. He found us and gave us a ride back to the canoe rental place, all without us having to ask at all. There is hope for the world as long as people like Chris continue to exist.

Math update plus a video

Well, the World Cup is over now. I can't wait until 2010. I am continuing to do math research. We proved that all Cayley Graphs formed from the units of a 2p cyclic group are distance regular of diameter three. Despite all the big words, we hardly used any math past high school algebra. On the plus side, Bernadette and I finally have something to put in our paper. The final days of the program are approaching, and I will be spending the remaining time trying to get a few more proofs, trying to write my first math paper, and preparing a conference talk. Yikes. I am being forced to grow up.

In my free time, I have noticed that the guy Zidane headbutted (Materazzi) is a jerk. Here is a video of 5 very dirty incidents he was in.

Materazzi Fouling

Excited about Math

So, for the past 4 weeks, I have understood about 3% of what I have been doing. I finally have something I am excited about and can actually do. I am now trying to construct a graph with 457 vertices that has no triangles, rectangles, ... ,hexagons, in it. I actually have a plan of attack for it and everything. And, to my knowledge, nobody has discovered this graph. Hooray for math!