Our world, our reality is governed by calculus. Everything is changing. As we grow old, as we move forward with the arrow of time, our points of view, perspectives, ideas, principles, and priorities are changing. It could be a steady change, a drastic change, instantaneous change, slow change, pivotal change, or whatever kind of change you can think of. Whatever change is happening in my life, there is one thing that is constant, and always residing within me, and that’s the thirst to understand the mathematical form of the universe around me.
And I fear that I will be forever lost. Forever detached from the world I used to know. Me being out of the loop for five years, out of the academe for four years, has created a deep longing within me to go back, or if not to go back, somehow to keep in touch with the basic nature of my mind. I miss scribbling equations!
You are going to ask me why “Happy Weekend”, well, it is because I was very happy last weekend. Let’s say I saw the faint light of my guiding star. It is very faint and I hope that my starship will take the course leading to that star and hopefully sooner or later I will go near it and see it bursting like our sun.
Last Sunday, it took me a good cup of coffee and a good conversation with Ian to make me realize that I still have time to catch up. All I need to do is to update myself with things I don’t know and review the things I know. But, I don’t know how much I know compared to what I need to know.
They said mathematics and physics are vast universes and difficult to chart. But I did explore certain portion of these universes once and I did not lose my tracks in the jungle of equations and theories. Maybe if I will go back through self study then I guess I can still find my way through the thickets even they are veiled by dark matters and energy. After-all the guiding star is there and it will help me to take this journey again.
I know that faint star is very far from me, and I have a long journey to go, light-years of journey. But with hope, perseverance and discipline, things will fall into their right places and they will bend space-time just to make this distance short, allowing me to reach that star, in the right time and right space.
Ian was talking about Bose-Einstein condensate last Sunday (as one of the problems in his exam). I know what Bose-Einstein condensate is but I don’t know its mathematics. As usual we discuss a lot of things about physics. Inside that small eatery (Migo’s café where you can have a good cup of coffee for 20 pesos and wifi for 5 pesos an hour) in KNL (Krus Na Ligas – pronounced as Kru na Liga), our universes of ideas collided, threw insights to each other and explored other ideas beyond our understanding. Of course, the LHC did not escape our mental collisions and we praised the engineering and scientific feats achieved by this project. When I’m with Ian, thousands of ideas will play around our spacetime. From politics to simple life, from physics and math to social and political sciences, from coffee to the spacetime fabric of the universe.
What made my faint star to appear was von Neumann’s book. I have now a copy of 1944 edition and I intend to read this along with my self-study series.
I hope and I am always hoping that I can get back to my track as soon as possible.
It’s difficult to find the faint guiding star in the immense darkness of the sky.
Anyway, starting with these, I hope I can find the rest of my way.
Calculus Review
Calculus Bible (see attachment)
Notes on Chapter 1
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7John von Neumann’s and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
I was happy last weekend because I found out that I could still recognize and remember much of my mathematics.
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