To give you some perspective, in Real Analysis my grades in fall, winter, spring were C+, B-, A and in Algebra I had C+, A-, B. In Number Theory I got A, B+ while in Stats I got a C. I have a large variety of Cs, B,s and As across all classes and quarters. No real rhyme or reason other than that I put in more effort some quarters than others. I was seriously sick for a while but that doesn’t fully account for the inconsistency. These series are all taught by same professor for the year anyway. Also no research. If by some miracle I get in to a UC, I would probably try to transfer to a Ph. D program which some schools allow. Either way, that’s only assuming I put in the study and effort and can actually do my work. I decided to go to grad school kinda late so I wish I had been more disciplined in college but hindsight is pointless. My letter of rec writers actually recommended I apply for a M.A. rather than a Ph. D.
Well I see number theory went well for you.
If I were you, I would ask my professors to get involved in some kind of research before you graduate, anything really, so you can hopefully coauthor a paper. The thing that concerns me about what you said is that is assuming you put the study and effort in. My initial reaction is that you feel you have to go to grad school as opposed to you want to go. This is a bit troubling because if I’m right, you will be spending the next 6 years of your life there being forced to do something you don’t really want to do … and that is assuming you can do the work, which segue-ways (sp?) into the other thing you said about you being able to do the work. I don’t know if you can retake classes over there (I would if I were you), but outside of this, the subject test is the most plausible way to demonstrate that you know your stuff. Said simply, as a mathematician, you should be proficient in analysis and algebra. I don’t know what you want to study in grad school, but odds are it will involve these in some shape or form. I hope you’re not thinking in terms of examples when you encounter problems, and instead, are analyzing it in terms of theory.
As someone who has a Ph.D… don’t go to grad school unless you are absolutly sure its what you want to do. As part of my Ph.D. in Econ I also got my M.A. in Mathematics. I’m telling you, if you’re heart is not in it, you are not ready for graduate school. You will spend a bunch of money only to discover your unhappy and more in debt.
It’s important to remember that graduate school is an entirely different ball game than undergraduate work. The expectations are higher, the work is heavier, the demands on your time are greater, if you’re in a big program you’ll be doing alot of stuff outside of your work that you’d probably rather not be doing. For example, in math you might be teaching remedial algebra for incoming college freshmen or you might be a T.A. for Calc 1 or something. Be prepared… Graduate School is a lifestyle, make sure you know what you’re getting into.
I tell this to math people all the time, the much more profitable use of your skills is to go take the actuarial exams rather than graduate work. Although a Masters work is a good opportunity to get things right. For example, we have people who apply to do Ph.D. work where I teach. We look at their undergrad, if its not so great, but they went and did an M.A. in Econ, did well, have good letters of recommendation, we can assume they goofed off in undergrad, didn’t get their life together until late and found a way to fix it. That being said, your graduate transcript had better look near flawless.
Why is the s taken off the end of maths in the American spelling/prounciation? Never quite understood that.
Hey Cool, a Math thread!
I have my undergrad degree in applied Math and am getting my masters in environmental systems mathematical modeling in the next few months. But on topic
THIS
I had no idea i would be expected to teach incoming freshman. I had ZERO expierience teaching, the assumption was knowing algebra was enough. I was lucky to be able to find grant work instead, but I can’t believe how much time the other grad students put in to just teaching their “Calc for bio majors” course.
Anyway, happy to have a place to yammer about math.
I can tell you from experience, Santa Cruz is a great place to live. It’s beautiful and depending on what you’re interested in, it’s a very interesting place to go to grad school.
You also don’t necessarily need a PhD to do PhD type work. A lot of industry jobs will have you work on very interesting topics, even if you have to do some grunt work for a couple of years to get the trust required.
I was/am considering a PhD and I got rejected from Stanford and Berkeley in the last two weeks. I got back into Santa Cruz so I still have an option, but my job is definitely very kick ass and I’m getting my name on papers. So the main advice I got is get as many papers published as possible and then you can take that around to anyone.
If you really want to be a professor, maybe some patience should be advised. Get some good experience and get a PhD later, and then try to switch over to professor. This is mostly because the job market is tough. Also because being a post-grad researcher doesn’t pay very well in most cases.
When I was in graduate school for my MS I did a TA once for some stupid intro class . Before that I did a couple of “MSI” tutor jobs, which has at least as much teaching as a TA generally does, but no grading. I just got good at doing everything as quickly as possible since I knew the subject matter too well and I also knew I had to explain it to someone who isn’t good at it.
Another opinion about university: Really should reduce ‘general education requirements’ because most of these survery courses suck ass. There’s not enough writing, math, or anything that takes any serious amount of dedication.
PS My PhD application was probably flawless for Stanford and Berkeley, but incredibly difficult to get into those programs(Stanford Aero and Astro, Berkeley EECS). Just as proof, I’ve already been contacted personally by a couple of people at UCSC about coming back for a PhD, so the people that do know me, know I’ll do my best if I want to come do a PhD. I’ll lose out on 80 grand a year from my current job besides any tuition I have to pay for, so it’s a tough pill to swallow considering I want to own a home, etc.
Unless you have a research assistantship, this is how you make your money while in grad school.
in honor of pi day let us all appreciate the most beautiful identity in math. Euler’s formula for when x = pi.
appreciate it!
American Revolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But in all honesty, it’s because both “math,” and “maths,” are slang for Mathematics. Slang is something that is based on colloquial usage, and that’s about it. Plus, all of the four letter course designations I’ve had in University have prompted me to just use “Math” in reference to course names.
For instance, Calculus 1 is designated as the course MATH 1A. The department gives the four letter designation, and Math is four letters, whereas Maths is 5. It’s really the most reasonable explanation I could think of. I’m assuming it’s the same reason we refer the Chemistry as “Chem.” This does raise the question, however, as to why my engineering courses aren’t referred to as “Anger” (ENGR) classes. Slang is a powerful thing.
A Man Walks Into a Department Office … - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education
This is the future for anyone who pursues a Ph.D. which seeks to answer questions of any kind of greater value about human behavior, how the world works, or general philosophy… I can tell you… this article is absolutly 100% true… It’s not just physical scientists who get this stuff… Anyone who would pursue a math Ph.D. wanting to become a professional researcher / professor should read this and understand that it is simulatenously one of the best and worst parts of the job…
(And let me say in particular, in economics, its largely bad. We get people who don’t know a thing about economics busting down our doors all the time asking us “HOW THE HELL IS FREE TRADE GOOD? IT COSTS PEOPLE THEIR JERBS!” or “The minimum wage should be higher, why can’t you see that?” to which I roll my eyes and try calmly to explain how supply and demand works and for the vast majority of crazies who waltz into my office who are not my students that usually just makes them more upset and they storm off to then yell at the dean who says I didn’t answer their questions sufficiently or to their liking… In math you get to have the joy of trying to explain to crazies they really didn’t prove anything with the mumbo jumbo equation they scribbled on the side of their grocery bag… have fun!)
This is why you bring your work home with you…
Lol, random people interrupting professors for their very important questions… Hmm I should try that out sometime.
Although your information is usually coherent, this is just plain wrong.
So, I know it’s three days too late … but I realized as I was walking through the hall today that celebrating Pi day on 3.14 is a bit strange. How could people not realize that designating a rational number to celebrate an irrational number is, well, irrational.
It shouldn’t be called Pi day, but Pi moment, which would be celebrated 0.00159265… hours after midnight. You would get bragging rights depending on how low your error of recognizing it was Pi moment is. Bonus points will be awarded for the number of series expansions of Pi you know. Tie breaker would be naming digits of Pi.
I think it would be funny to go around to a bunch of classrooms celebrating pi day and ask the students what pi is. 90% of them would only be able to say 3.14 and then their teachers would feel pretty bad (although a good amount of the teachers might say the same thing).
Well, with the start of another semester, it’s time to dust this old thread off again
Hey I just want to say, this is a true story ALREADY this semester. Some kid already came in and interrupted the first day math department pre semester meeting to explain some great new breakthrough he had made and it was literally written on the side of a paper grocery bag… Of course, he was woefully mistaken and it was hogwash… but its a true story and our semester has been going on for 2 weeks now…
Yay for professional math researchers… I’ll stick to social science 
Even if it is a true story, the content you were refering to in the thread I responded to regarding your gross mischaracterization of mathematicians as a whole is still just plain wrong. If you’re expecting some sort of “Good Will Hunting” moment every time you go to a faculty meeting, go rent the DVD, get it out of your system, and return to reality with the rest of us. The real “hogwash” as you put it, is the propagation of such a sterotype, and no less by someone who purportedly has a doctorate. It’s bad enough most people can’t comprehend elementary algebra. For you to actually imply that your ridiculous story validates your stereotype is not only a base rate fallacy, but spreads misinformation to anyone who doesn’t know any better. It’s no better than the people on youtube who think all math is false because they saw a video of some guy claiming that 1 = 2 because he inadvertently divided by zero. That’s why division by zero is undefined. If it was defined, then you get ridiculous nonsense like 1 = 2 = 3 = …
To put it in your terms, you are about as informed about what mathematicians do as the people who don’t know a thing about economics busting down your doors all the time telling you “HOW THE HELL IS FREE TRADE GOOD? IT COSTS PEOPLE THEIR JERBS!” are.
And another thing, you wouldn’t even be an economist if we didn’t work out the mathematical tools for you to do so.
You’re welcome btw.
To flesh things out a little more about why division by zero is undefined, let’s stick with only the integers. We say “a divides b” if and only if there exists some integer c such that ac = b
Suppose we DO allow division by zero. Let a = 0 and b equal some non-zero integer. Specifically, let b = 1 Then, since 0 times any integer is 0, we have
0 = 0*c = 1
So division by zero leads to the conclusion that 0 = 1
Now let b = 2, and a = 0. Then we have
0 = 0c = 2
So division by zero leads to the conclusion that 0 = 2
So since 0 = 1 and 0 = 2, this also means that 1 = 2.
So division by 0 leads to ridiculous statements like
0 = 1 = 2.
This essentially means that every integer would be equal to itself. Such a number system would be absurd, so to avoid this, we leave division by zero as undefined in the real number system. When I say real of course, I am referring to the number system that uses the real numbers and not using real as in “genuine”
This is one of the nice things about calculus. In calculus, one does not care so much about what a function is evaluated to AT a point as what a function does AROUND the point. This idea allows us to explore what happens to a function like 1/x for values of x that are as close to zero as we’d like, without it ACTUALLY being zero. With this idea, one can in essence study what dividing by zero eventually leads to without actually dividing by zero. Of course, as you divide 1 by positive numbers that are very very small, the result grows as large as you like. So one summarizes this result symbolically by writting
The limit as x goes to zero (from the right side) of 1/x grows arbitrarily large.
Okay okay okay. Hold on. I tell the story for brevity and to lighten the mood a little. Obviously academia is not the art of Eureka to Eureka right? I think we all know that. If my words did anything to give a false impression of mathematicians (the overwheliming majority of which I have the greatest respect for) please let me be clear that I meant nothing of the sort. More so, I’m just speaking about the craziness which academics in misunderstood (or little understood) professions can experience. It was a funny story meant to be a funny story that’s it.
AND Before we talk about my being an economist thanks to the work of mathematicians… I just want to say that I personally feel that mathematics has its place in Social Science, but Economics has become over mathematicisized (I know that’s not a word but you know what I mean) and Economists need to get back to theory and coming up with new ideas (particularly in Macroeconomics where its the most egregious) instead of refining ever more complex mathematical models that yield no discernable progress in predictive power.
But with that said, certainly modern Economics owes Mathematics a big thank you and a big hug… If you want to accept either the thank you or hug on math’s behalf please feel free
ALSO: Kudos on your fine description of the effects of dividing by zero and explaining the usefulness of calculus in exploring limits and seeing what effectively happens when we get closer to dividing by zero… Nicely done sir.