Year 2 Spring at HKUST

I started writing this on the first day of the summer term (June 16). Somehow I think my memory got even worse, I cannot remember much of what went on at the start of the semester. But what I can recall is that I was a bit distraught about the lack of courses. Originally, I was really looking forward to the course ‘Mathematical Structures in Modern Statistical Physics and Quantum Field Theory’, originally supposed to be taught by Chang Huai-liang. But apparently he quit UST :sob: :sob: :sob:. WE WERE ROBBED. I also wanted to take some sort of representation theory with Marberg, but he didn’t teach this term for some reason.

So I think I said that one of the main focuses this semester is gonna be complex analysis since I am taking three courses on complex analysis: undergrad ‘Complex Analysis’, postgrad ‘Complex Function Theory’, and a reading course titled ‘Conformally Invariant Processes in the Plane’, after the book of the same name by Lawler. I would say that this has been a hit or miss. Due to certain reasons which if you know you know, I did not actually have to spend too much time on complex analysis to get good grades. But then this means that I did not really get a good handle on a lot of the material, especially in classical complex function theory topics. But actually, I don’t feel too sad about this. The more I learned about complex function theory, the more I realise how shit the theory is. A lot of the proofs are just incredibly synthetic and you don’t really learn anything after reading it. Anyway, I think I have a pretty good grasp on the parts that I actually care about.

Let’s move onto the other highlight of this semester: probability on graphs. The aforementioned reading course aims to introduce the Schramm-Loewner evolution, a class of random curves that describe the scaling limits of lattice models from statistical physics. Conveniently, my IRE ‘Guided Study on Research II’ project was about the loop-erased random walk, which is actually one of these lattice models. Anyway, for more about these stuff, search online. I also wrote a post about this on my other blog Peasant Maths. I also took an actual graph theory course this semester. I enjoyed a large part of the course that were more algebraic and combinatorial, and less algorithmic. Luckily, the professor didn’t even test some of the more algorithmic parts in the exams. Sadly, the course ended with the prof crashing out and deducting a gajillion points from our final exams for a ‘better grade distribution’.

Another thing to mention is that somehow I escaped poor grades in common core and English language courses. Of course, it still pulled down my GPA, but not by that much.

Posts on this blog are supposed to be much more high quality. The quality of this post is pretty low.