О Вашингтоне с фотографиями позже.
Пока - о моем профессоре линейки. Зашла сегодня к нему, поговорили.
"The book we have does not really correspond to what we study in class..."
"I found a book that is almost to the letter what you teach us..."
"I WANT IT," Bayer jumps off the chair.
A few minutes later: "... I've gotta tell you, you have one of the most creative ways of approaching my class."
And then he went on telling me to keep through, and, even though people might tell me that my approach to learning mathematics is weird, never listen, never give up on it. He said it's the way that in ten years might lead to actual discoveries. He said that there are two types of smart people: those who get stuck on classical scholarship and those like me. Classical scholarship takes you so far, he says.
A few hours later, at our review session, we had this system of equations. Professor turns to the class and asks what are the solutions. I let my mind wander off the usual way and give the answer. Bayer: "Well, she can solve THIS in her head, but you don't actually need to." THIS being a system of equations in 3 variables. Then he went on a 40-minute-long dive into modern algebras' ancient Chinese residual thingy-thingy. I asked if we couldn't just follow the logic of partial fractions. Bayer took a look at the problem, chuckled, looked me in the eye, said "You're actually very right!", and apologized to the student who asked the question for taking an arcane way to explain it.
Funny part about this is that this was part of the method of approaching mathematics that I have been obsessing about for over a year now. Никак не могла собрать смелость в кулак, чтобы поговорить об этом с кем-то из профессоров, но теперь уж точно поговорю.
На тех же office hours профессор, хоть мы с ним и не говорили об оценках, сказал, "It doesn't matter what grade do you walk away from this class. It means nothing that you have trouble when you have to take care of things beyong your control. It's perfectly okay to put work or academics second to your people for a while. Your creative way in those 10,000 hours is what's going to put you above and beyond."
Fuck this shit, I'm going to be a mathematician.