Living in the 1990s
I remember I first learned numbers by apples. I can still recall the textbook they used to teach us how to do 2+3=5 by using illustrations of apples. As I got older, I learned how to factor polynomials: I thought that was the most hard thing in my life! Lot’s of people say that calculus is hard, but to me the first shock in mathematics was factorization. After factorization, I think math kind of smoothly increased in difficulty. By the time I learned calculus and differential geometry in college, my math was in 19 century Gauss’ era. For physics, since I did quantum mechanics in the same year, it was early 20 century in physics. Last year, I did QFT, black hole radiation stuff, and I guess the things I studied is roughly 1970s.
Today, I was doing 1990s. It was a paper on Calabi-Yau manifolds and mirror symmetry on the physics side. The paper was quite dense, well at first I thought I was just rubbish, but the author told me she omitted lots of long calculations to make it concise and to demonstrate the ideas properly. Nevertheless, I found it quite hard. I had to flip through algebraic topology books, complex geometry books, lecture notes on Calabi-Yau manifolds, and so on. Ironically, the more I looked into the books, the more I felt lost. I was frustrated in the end and just sat in my chair staring at the wall.
My office mate, who is a post-doc, just came in the office said hello, and asked what I am going to do for the weekend. I said that I think I should come out to work in the department, and I explained my situation. Well her comments were quite surprising to me: “At least that means that you are in a good field. If a field is easy, that means you are in a bad one.”
Well, it feels like there is a step function between MPhil level maths and Ph.D. I am currently stuck in 1990s and dreaming of 21 century math/physics. I hope I could hope into the 21st century soon!
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