Since Google Code-In 2016, I’ve been a frequent contributor to Terasology, an open-source voxel based game (a bit like Minecraft) developed by the MovingBlocks organization. Sometime this February, the org admin asked me if I would like to be a mentor for Google Summer of Code, an online program where undergraduate students work on a project over several months under the guidance of mentors. For the past 4 months, I have been mentoring Arpan Banerjee, a student at IIT Bombay (do check out his blog here). He had come up with a proposal to implement an Anatomy-based health system for...
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A few days ago I had to buy toothpaste. Of course, in today’s modern and rapidly progressing world, the consumer has a lot of unethical consumption choices, which translates to shelves upon shelves of red, white, and blue (big surprise with the colors there isn’t it) elongated rectangular boxes advertizing much the same thing. As I often do, I tried to stay away from the biggies—Colgate, Pepsodent, Crest, and the like—and go for a cheaper and presumably just as effective alternative. This particular elongated rectangular box was priced around 15 US cents per ounce, a third the cost of the...
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It’s a Saturday morning, the last day of Root class, and all 25 MathILy-Er students are in the same room, busy at whiteboards and tables and incessant discussions. It’s crowded and you can hear everybody’s soft yet intense voices trying to prove, conjecture, disprove, convince, find, understand. A few friends and I have been working on a single proof for three hours; this particular problem has not been solved by either Root class for the last two weeks and is bugging everyone. We think we have it! We try to explain to a bewildered passer-by. Not good enough, too confusing....
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I should have written this post around two weeks ago, when MathILy-Er actually ended, but I didn’t, and I’m tempted to rationalize this late update by claiming I was reflecting on my experiences but in reality I was too busy for reflection anyway. Anyway, here it is. Following up from my previous post about MathILy-Er, the summer program was five weeks of intense mathematics at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, the expository details of which you can read in the linked post. Here I want to talk more about our two final weeks at MathILy-Er, called ‘Branch class’, and a general...
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Here’s a math problem you’ve probably heard about: I give you a graph—a collection of vertices and edges between them—such that you can draw the edges without any crossings (this is called a “planar graph”). I tell you that you have to color every vertex with some color such that no vertices which have an edge between them have the same color. What is the minimum number of colors you need? The answer is a notoriously unsatisfactory theorem called the Four-Color Theorem which, as you may have guessed, states that the answer is ‘four’; it’s ‘unsatisfactory’ because the proof involves...
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