Week 3

June 21, 2009

A whole week has gone by since I wrote! The time is just flying by! This week we spent most of our time analyzing the catalog that we made last week. First we started out looking at theorems that have already been proved for normal energy to see if any of them held for distance, Laplacian or signless Laplacian, which we calculated and cataloged last week. We do not have any proofs for those yet but we have found many theorems that do hold for all or some of the other types of energy. Also, I found a pattern for the maximum distance energy but I have not figured out how to prove it. The professor who is working on the project with us came up with a proof for a theorem. He adapted an inequality for energy that was proved for Laplacian energy and proved it. We all checked it and tried to figure out when the equality cases held. I had an idea for how to do the proof but I knew it wasn’t all correct but I put it on the board and explained to the group what I was thinking and to see if they could see how to fix that parts that I didn’t think were correct. It was at the end of our time on Friday and no one else could see how to fix the problem areas. Oh well, the professor thanked me for sharing my idea. He said sometimes people aren’t willing to go to the board and share ideas/proofs that are not 100% correct.

There was some turbulence this week in our group. The guy in our group, Duy, has been doing the programming that helped us quicken the cataloging process. However, since he did the programming, he felt that he didn’t have to do any of the calculations for the catalog. It wasn’t hard to do the calculations since we used a computer software called Maple to do the actual calculations based on our inputs but it was monotonous since we had to do the calculations for 208 graphs. The rest of us, particularly Kate and I, did not agree with his idea of not doing any calculation. We all understand that programming takes time but we were working the whole time he was programming, fixing errors in the old numbers, so it wasn’t like we were taking a break while he worked his butt off. He didn’t understand our side of the argument and as hard as we tried to convince him, he didn’t think we understood him. We did come to an agreement (or so we thought!) that Duy would calculate half as many numbers as the rest of us because he wrote the program. The next morning when we were in the computer lab to do the calculations, he wouldn’t do any. This really hit a nerve with Kate. Duy and Kate ended up arguing again. That was early in the week and we have all moved past it but group work can really be challenging!!

For fun this week we did several things. On Tuesday night most of us went to the movie theater and saw “The Hangover”. It was funny but kind of stupid but not so stupid that it was bad. On Wednesday, it was one of the guys birthday so we had a big pot luck dinner and then a dance party. On Friday we all went out to dinner with two of the professors at a local restaurant called “Mountaintown Staton”. I wasn’t feeling adventurous so I had a chicken caesar warp and fries. That night we played apples to apples and hung out. It started raining (we were all excited for a thunderstorm!) and several of us went out and played in the rain, splashing in the puddles and watching the lightening. The rain was very refreshing. Yesterday I biked around Mount Pleasant and looked in a bunch of stores but didn’t buy anything except for a few food items. It was a nice relaxing day and I spent awhile knitting and reading “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. I also vacuumed our apartment for the first time since we got here! It was in desperate need of a cleaning!! Today I spent some time reading math books and other useful information. I also went to church and it was a normal mass this time, no incense or procession.

Below are a few pictures of my room and the CMU campus.

My bed and desk
My dresser

Behind the trees is Pearce Hall, where we work.

The Library