Mar-Apr 25 Journal Entries

A friend of mine (Jacob) wrote an essay on Alphabetical Diaries, which is an interesting book because the author was able to craft a coherent story by shuffling around her writing in her journal.

I also recently read Chemistry because another friend had mentioned it to me (almost in passing) and it is another book that is structured like a journal that I found quite moving. I agree mostly with my friend’s (Gavin) review, where his 3/5 translates to “good, won’t reread.” I wrote down the words:

It is a mass of text. I didn’t realize it was fiction until I read more about the author on the side.

I say mass because you hold the book and it weighs you and asks you: do you really want to go to grad school, do you really want to fall in love, do you really want to understand it all?

Above all else? Have a dog.

I don’t use goodreads because I would embarrass myself. But on this site I’m okay with a little bit of silliness.

But anyway, I thought I would do something similar. I wrote a journal from March 15th to April 11th of 2025, or the vacation days between Hilary and Trinity term of Oxford in 2025. Originally, I wanted to put it in here in it’s entirety, but I realized that it had become too personal and long to do that well.

So I’m picking a few sentences from each day instead. Here it is.

Precursor to the Journal

I shared this journal with others, so I felt the need to have a precursor.

I’m not actually putting most of my academic stuff here, as that is seperate to this journal. Also, this is kinda ugly! That’s all right! And finally, I’m lucky I get to feel like I’m living at the right place, in the right time, with the right people.

Journal Start

March 15th: Flew back with Xi, and it was really, really fun, and I would definitely want to travel more with friends.

March 16th: We (Jinglin and I) ran to Target and bought some stuff. I spent 25 USD on Euan’s birthday, and we got a bunch of stuff! […] I got us Starbucks drinks because I still had free credits though I think both of our stomachs regretted this. […] At Playspace I met with Sasha for the first time and also Jacky, who gave me his guitar to play during the session.

March 17th: I went to the hospital to get my arm checked. I thought it was for my right arm, as that’s the arm that feels alien, but it was actually for my left arm, which had been feeling quite normal. Genuinely feels quite full. I don’t think my right arm will ever feel fully normal.

March 18th: This was a sidequesting day. I went on a walk after lunch to Gunn. I spent maybe 3 and a half hours there. […] I started to walk back, then I realized I forgot my glasses at Gunn, so I walked back, and saw Josh. He’s probably entering Math+CS at St. Johns and it was nice to see him be happy. […] Then I went to the Stanford Gym. I spent 4 hours at Stanford. […] Jacob kidnapped me, and I had dinner at his place at FloMo. He’s doing good.

March 19th: I drove over to Ben’s house and we talked about math, […] Then I used my bike from elementary school to bike to Stanford Gym. It was kind of silly to bike on it since it’s so freaking small!!! Like, what the hell!!! It’s honestly a harder workout, lol.

March 20th: I worked on a hard bonus problem and felt satisfied. Texted a friend who said “trivial by complex analysis,” but I didn’t feel satisfied by the answer he had in his notes, since it skipped over a lot of the small tidbits (why does it converge? etc). Like, yes, it’s obvious, that’s the whole point. (Update: Never mind it is trivial by complex analysis.)

March 21st: Biked to the Caltrain station, which was crazy, because, like, whoa! I could’ve done that all of high school! […] Went and got lunch with Ritik. It had been 3 years since Ajit emailed us together. I think I’ve changed a startling amount in those three years […] I wanted to get dinner with another friend (maybe this is hypersocial), but had to postpone that since I needed to drive my dad to the airport.

March 22nd: My brother drove us to an Indian Restaurant. I’ve never actually really loved idli. You always need to eat it with sambar, but sometimes the sambar is too chunky, or the idli is not spongy, and it feels like there’s too much going on. But I’ve always liked medu vada, whoops.

March 23rd: Stumbled on to gamedevmap.com/ which was such an insane find! Like, whoa! […] We (Spencer and I) went on a walk immediately after dinner and walked to Stanford. It was a long walk. A lot of talking. About people, college, mathematics. Some philosophy here and there. It had good vibes.

March 24th: Slow, calm day. Genuine love for continuous mathematics.

March 25th: I had to speedbike to the dentist’s office. He flamed me for not regularly flossing then admitted he only really started after he graduated college.

March 26th: Finished a problem and then biked over to the gym EARLY. […] Started to Bike back and saw Emmanuel. Said hi! He went to swim. It was a really nice day to swim. Stopped by CoHo. Got myself a Horchata though it was aggressively mid. Saw Sasha! He was getting breakfast… at 2 pm. Both of these small interactions put dumb smiles on my face. I love the college environment for that vibe.

March 27th: It was raining, so Nathan picked me up and we drove. […] We got lunch at a dorm.

March 28th: I took Caltrain up to SF and then called Vincent Cheng. […] I used a BayWheels to get to the meeting. On the way I passed by a playground I had visited in middle school. It brought back a surprising amount of feelings and memories and I am grown.

March 29th: Not much I can say about the day.

March 30th: I got back on the route that I used to walk to school every day. It felt strange doing it in reverse, since I usually did a different route on the way back, but it was nice. I saw the big, big wall of art. And I love it.

March 31st: I watched an Acerola video on a topic that I already knew and it was cool to see.

April 1st: My mom joked I had a huge bug on my back, so I slowly rammed myself into the wall. She laughed. […] I went climbing. I think I was angry at my shoulder, but it handled fine. It was April Fools, so everything was labeled a V4. […] I showered and got back to work. April 1st was a soft day of self.

April 2nd: It was another day of sidequesting, though not as complete? I worked on my notebooks (mathematical ones) and they feel fleshed out. […] I also saw someone that at first I wasn’t sure where I recognized from, but then I remembered that they were someone I had seen at Oxford! […] On the way back, I saw Michelle To! […] I definitely need better time management with going to the gym. Currently I just throw my body at things and I’m happy that it responds well.

April 3rd: I got through more of the technical stuff and began listing down important stuff I had skipped. […] I got lemonade at CoHo. Super tasty.

April 4th: Cooked for my mom. Biked to the gym. […] I biked to CoHo and waited for Jacob. I got a strawberry matcha since I was wearing red & green as well. […] I biked back, but went through the park on the way back, since there were no cars. I saw Michael Wang (I’ve known him for 7 years) and Riley (his dog!)! […] I showered when I got back and finished the proof. It feels like things click once you get them done, you know? You kind of understand the importance even more, even if no one has told you explicitly.

April 5th: I played a little more Balatro. It is addictive. Shyuab and Charles texted me about this because Discord exposed me. […] I drove my family to the gym and I swam. It was my first time swimming in forever (possibly since going diving?). I just did breaststroke because I still don’t trust my shoulder. It felt good.

April 6th: I spent most of this day hunched at my chair, finishing up the exposition and spotting spots for my mistakes and worries.

April 7th: I spent an awkward amount of time messing with the latex in markdown. I use Jekyll, which is really only great if you want to put markdown documents that have basic text. This is pretty fine for me, but for latex, it’s really annoying at times. […] Ultimately I got it to work, and it taught me a bit about how to deal with it. The commit messages do get unhinged though, so I definitely couldn’t ever make the repository public. […] Prof. Gupta emailed me back and asked why you couldn’t just use Horner’s Rule, which is a very reasonable question! However, this would require computing the polynomial symbolically from the Circuit to convert it to sparse representation, and would be just as inefficient. So I sent an email, and he understood, and I was happy. […] I helped my brother debug his GPU problems. I do find it really interesting that CUDA errors just make the GPU just screw up terribly instead of gracefully failing. I don’t get why, and that I think shows some limitedness to my thinking.

April 8th: I fried up some food and had lunch with my mom. I biked to the gym early, though I ended up stopping by Peter’s location. It was an International Relations event, with free Salt & Straw ice cream, which was huge! […] I finished some studying for the night. I feel okay preparing for collections.

April 9th: I kind of didn’t want to Journal today. I spent most of today studying. I cooked kimchi pancakes. […] I biked back slowly. My body is so tired. I am not tracking how much sleep I’m getting. During both bike rides I was thinking about the asymptotics of the ‘distinct prime factors’ function. E.g. let dpi(x) give you the number of primes in x’s factorization. How does dpi grow asymptotically? Obviously dpi(x) <= log_2(x), since the smallest a prime can be is 2, and so you maximize the number of primes by setting them all to 2. But this is clearly quite bad! I would be very surprised if this isn’t already somewhere in the literature. In fact, once I got home, I checked OEIS and found: oeis.org/A001221. It gives you the average order is significantly slower than just logarithmic: The average order of dpi(n) is asymptotic to log(log), more specifically, Sum_{k=1..n} dpi(k) ~ Sum_{k=1..n} log log k. What surprises me is that this is from 2015. It’s a very natural question that I’m surprised the reference came out so late, since it feels like a result you can try and attack using standard techniques. I’m further confused, because this reference from Hardy & Ramanujan gives it? This might just be one of those things with OEIS where the documentation always leaves a little something to be desired. I also find it both reasonable and quite beautiful that both the distinct prime factor counting and the overall prime factor counting have the same overall order. The generating function is quite immediate as well. I studied and showered at home.

April 10th: More studying. It’s fun! […] I got home and reviewed my brother’s work and studied.

April 11th: This is my last journal entry. […] I biked back to say hi to Jacob. We went to a talk from Tadashi Tokieda on Emmy Noether. Amazing talk! […] I hung out with Agastya. We worked on SMT puzzles together. […] Allie let me know my site was down. I panickingly fixed it, but it left me with a lot of last-minute packing to do in the morning with my technology. Good night.

Thoughts

Right after the journal, I went and biked the east coast of Taiwan with my brother. I will put some of those notes on this website in some time.

I liked journalling in this new format a lot. It didn’t take as much time as I expected, and because it was just in a google doc I was able to make it clean. I also liked taking a break from it, weirdly enough?

I’m not sure if this reduction based approach was best. April 7th is confusing if you haven’t tried to read a little bit of my previous post on Algebraic Circuits, though it’s also confusing because it is not clear what I mean by “gracefully failing.” I believe I meant “why doesn’t it have more readable error messages?” I am not sure.

Because I wasn’t tracking all of my academic studying and stuff, I’m worried that it looks like I was unstudious. Maybe I was, as I had just returned from college and it was break.

I haven’t properly journalled since April 11th, mostly because I spent most of my time studying instead. I have notes here and there, but I will most likely centralize it somewhere soon. I’ve always tried to use Obsidian for technical notes but always defaulted to something that can better handle LaTex. I think now I know that I really enjoy a mono-journal (e.g. my journal is a single document instead of one a day), which contrasted with the satisfying graphs that Obsidian can offer. But writing is what matters, not necessarily maximizing the connectivity of the note graph. So, maybe!

I do not know if I’m baller enough to make my own, though I do know some features I’d like to have, most notably an easy way to upload photos from my phone on the go and toggle them on and off on the sides while viewing.

I imagine right after Prelims I’ll properly start redocumenting some of my life. I remember reading that one of Tanya’s pieces of advice for young mathematical researchers was to write everything down. I do this in my math journals, though you can see when I was thinking about dpi(x) that I was doing this just a little bit, though informally.

And, I’ll end with the precursor:

And finally, I’m lucky I get to feel like I’m living at the right place, in the right time, with the right people.