- I split my time between feeling frustrated, because I'm talking in German; feeling guilty, because I'm talking in English; and feeling lonely, because I'm not talking to anyone. It isn't enough to seriously dampen my spirits, but it is enough to make me grateful for the internet and the friendly people who talk to me through the internet.
- Work's already plentiful and hard -- though this is of course also a good thing, because it's stimulating. (For you mathematicians, here's a nice problem from my half-finished model theory assignment, due tomorrow: prove that there exist uncountably many linear orderings of a countable set of elements.)
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Just procrastination . . . .
No, life's not perfect, even in Germany. Like,
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4 comments:
"there exist uncountably many linear orderings of a countable set of elements"
......wait, WHAT?
Or do you high-level mathematicians use "countable" = "countably infinite"?
Indeed, sorry for the confusion.
"dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus . . . ." --
still countable :)
I realised after chatting to Bojan that this problem isn't quite all it should be; I'd mistranslated out of model-theory-language. Properly, it should be,
"prove that there exist uncountably many linear orderings of a countable set of elements, where two orderings identical up to an automorphism of the underlying set are counted as the same,"
which is somewhat harder (unless you'd assumed this meaning the first time anyway).
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