Start of IAP

IAP is too short man. You're telling me that we're a fourth of the way through already?

Independent Activities Period (IAP) runs during the month of January and is a period of time where MIT students get the chance to pursue individual projects. For example, some classes that are running this IAP are WebLab, bike building, generative AI and music, Pokerbots, and glassblowing. The beginner level language classes are also available, though those are quite time-intensive. I know someone who's in Japanese I and she said that it was 3 hours in class and 5 hours out of class everyday. She had to learn 40 words a day and there was a hiragana test on day 4 or something. It sounds quite fun, honestly. You're completely immersed in the language for a month and you come out with a semester's worth of knowledge. Generally the bigger IAP classes are quite a time commitment since you are learning that skill in a short four weeks. There are also smaller workshops like intro to proofwriting, learning Julia, MatLab, to name a few.

This IAP, I'm taking part of the DRP (Directed Reading Program), which is something that math departments have around the country. You pick a math textbook, you read it, and you present what you learned at the end of the program, which would be at the end of January for me. I'm also doing Battlecode with some friends. Battlecode is a coding competition where you write code for a bunch of little bots to execute in a battlefield against another team.

DRP

I'm reading The Arithmetic of Elliptic Curves by Silverman. So far I'm like 25 pages in. The first two chapters are a quick overview of algebraic geometry, of which I've been exposed to, though I don't claim to understand it very well. I still don't really understand it well. My mentor told me to get to Riemann-Roch by Sunday, and it's Saturday. I know it's only a few pages away but these pages are hard. Also understanding Riemann-Roch??? I'm just a small little freshman, why are you expecting me to understand Riemann-Roch?

One format of meme that gets me really fired up is the "English majors comforting their STEM friends when they have to read 10 pages." Huh? You try to read this book, then. "Let $R$ be a Noetherian local domain that is not a field, let $\mathfrak{m}$ be its maximal ideal, and let $k = R/\mathfrak{m}$ be its residue field." That's not even the hard part! These are just definitions. This book isn't actually that dense, though these first two chapters don't give many proofs because it's supposed to be an overview of alg geo.

Thankfully, a friend of mine told me about this lecture series on YouTube by Alvaro Lozano-Robledo on elliptic curves, and I'm pretty sure this guy is just following the book. At least for the first two lectures, he goes through the exact same things as the book does. I've been trying to watch these videos, but they aren't that helpful. I guess I haven't tried very hard yet so we'll see.

I think my main problem is that I don't have a solid enough understanding of the prereqs for this book. As in, I'm familiar with the definitions but I haven't worked with them much at all. I know what a Galois group is, but that's about the extent of my knowledge. I'm a bit more fuzzy on my number fields and general number theory knowledge. Or I suppose more algebraic number theory. I think I need to do more exercises in general. Doing exercises are hard. They're active learning, whereas watching lectures is passive and easy.

Yeah, I suppose I should put in more work on this. But I also need to do Battlecode, which I haven't spent much time on at all. And to think DRP was only supposed to be closer to a 2-3 hour/day commitment.

Battlecode

I don't know Java, which is the language that this is in. I don't know how to implement coding projects. I know how to code, and I kinda know how to make stuff with code, but I am by no means a programmer. I'm doing it with some friends, and some of them know how to code, so they're going to have to carry. I'll try my best to pull my weight in the project. It's a good experience for me, to figure out how to implement ideas onto code.

I kinda regret not doing something else during IAP. For example, the generative AI and music program sounds super cool. It would be nice to pick up a new skill over IAP, which is when I think a lot of people are picking up new skills, but instead I'm spending most of my time finding a place to coop up and read a math textbook, which I could whenever.

But the DRP is nice because otherwise I would have never had the courage to pick up a math textbook and commit to it for so long. Reading math is also a skill I have to pick up. Welp, there's no regretting, since everything's already set in stone. Make the most of what you have already, I suppose. I'm also kinda worried that I won't get through a lot of this book or do a lot on Battlecode. I mean, it's been slow progress on the book, and at this rate, I'll have read 100 pages. Wait, that's kind of a lot. But also, I don't understand like a fourth of the content.

Argh, I don't know. I'll manage. I know I will.