this definitely is the best day of the semester.

it’s much warmer than it is in San Jose (a projection of a whopping 79 degrees), and I now witness a coalescence of death and life—some trees await the revival period, while others have begun to flaunt their green extensions.

I have learned so much today. the office hour with Professor Thaler was astounding.

you see, all your stereo is is an array of RLC circuits that selectively filter out frequencies according to how you set them up. once you have resonance with the LC loop, no current flows through the resistor. bass, treble, and EQ? they’re all just circuits! most people who go for Course VI are in it for computer science, but that’s not to say that the 6-1s are anything bad. circuit design is tough. at LIGO, gravitational waves are measured in pretty much the same way. the universe is distorted everywhere with all these frequencies—how can you make sure that you only detect gravitational waves? you design resonators that filter out, say, the 60Hz frequency of your monitor. in fact, the US runs on 60Hz AC. there are a lot of applications everywhere. electromagnetism really is at the root—devices, machines, everything.

I’ve never been able to appreciate fully the applications of what I’m learning now. this trial by fire is exactly what I’ve always wanted. at other colleges, the things I’m doing now would be covered late sophomore year—I’m essentially a year ahead, and MIT knows that. it wants us to excel, and in torturing us with all this work, it adequately does that. who assigns complex circuit analysis to freshmen? after today’s talk with Professor Thaler, the magnitude of all the hours I crunched into the problem set and classwork pales in comparison to what I’ve gained from them.

likewise with linear algebra.

you know, in grade school, you’re just taught that some things are rigid. you just memorize a certain fact, and there, you’re a mathematician. it’s quite the contrary here. how do we define a line? a plane? a hyperplane? in grade school, we just call them as such. we don’t define them as vector spaces and subspaces. likewise, we don’t learn and derive Euler’s formula from the power series for sine and cosine. we’re just told that people made an arbitrary variable i to be the root of -1. here, this class is really giving me the foundations for math that I’ve always wanted. I may not be as good at math as I thought, but I’ve certainly learned to navigate math.

now that I’m actually doing these things for myself, I’m so excited for what the future holds.

oh, and the freshman formal is tonight, along with a play production at 10PM.

today is a beautiful day.

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