Posted by martin on
Friday, 30 April 2010 at 20:29
I had a week at home in Belfast last week. Since I resolved a couple of years ago not to fly for routine journeys, it is quite a long journey between Belfast and Paris. In the past I have always done this with a night’s stop in England, taking most of two days. This time I broke my journey Paris to Belfast in Leeds for the Future Sounds of Swing weekend. This was almost the only lindy classes I have gone to since last June. It was a great weekend.
On my way back from Belfast to Paris, I took the sleeper train from Edinburgh to London. This allowed me to get from Belfast to Paris in 24 hours (with a bit more time required for travel at either end). It takes about 7 hours leaving at 11.40. The train during the day, which makes several stops, takes less than 5 hours. I suppose it goes slower to give a smoother ride and so that you can get a decent night’s sleep. In fact you can stay in your cabin for another hour after it arrives. It cost me £35 with a rail card.
The room is very small with not much more than a pair of bunk beds and a sink. When I saw it I worried whether there would be space for my suitcase, but there was a shelf for it. I was sharing with one other man. It was very comfortable and the movement was barely noticeable. You get brought tea or coffee and a biscuit when the train arrives (in a disposable cup, I suppose so you can take it away if you want).
When I got back to Bures, as soon as I looked across the valley I could see that something had changed. The woods which cover all the upper part of the valley side had gone from brown to green. The leaves have come out on all the deciduous trees on the campus, which was only just starting when I left. This makes everything greener but less open.
Tags lindy, paris, train, travel
Posted by martin on
Saturday, 20 March 2010 at 22:45
In the past six weeks I have taken four exams: two on the courses from the first semester (October-January) and two on the courses I have taken January-February.
The reason the latter came so soon after the former is because they are in different institutions
- the first two were here in Orsay, the second two in other institutions in Paris with different timetables.
These exams were hard, and very different from exams in Cambridge.
(Note: this post discusses pure maths exams only.)
Tags exams, m2, paris, tripos
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Posted by martin on
Sunday, 08 November 2009 at 17:54
I took a trip to London on Wednesday. It takes 4 hours to get from where I live in Bures-sur-Yvette to St Pancras by Eurostar (and under 6 hours to Cambridge, where I went for a weekend in October). It is surprisingly cheap - £27.50 if you book far enough in advance (about 4 weeks in advance to travel mid-week). In London I went to see Ed, who did Part III and is now doing a PhD in Imperial, and went to the London Number Theory seminar. This seminar reminded me that the stuff I have been doing recently is much more “geometry” than “number theory” - I am generally happiest doing something in the middle.
I only planned to go to London for the day, but my time there was nearly doubled because I was confused about the time of the train home. I discovered this as I was going to check in, bang on 30 minutes in advance as requested, which was in fact the time the train was due to depart. So I heard it leaving. This was the last train to Paris so I had to wait until the next morning. When I explained to the lady at the ticket office what had happened, she looked like she thought I was completely stupid (which I was). But she said she would class me as having missed the train (I am not sure why this was being generous; maybe it is meant for people who had delayed connections), and so I could change the ticket without paying anything. But only to the next train, at 5.25 in the morning. Fortunately there is a youth hostel only a couple of minutes from St Pancras where I could stay.
Tags london, paris, train
Posted by martin on
Sunday, 20 September 2009 at 15:52
I had my first lectures in Paris this week. They are much longer than Cambridge lectures: 2 or 2.5 hours per lecture. And you have one lecture in the morning, then the same course again in the afternoon. (In Cambridge lectures are 1 hour, you have about 3 different lectures in a day, and they are only in the mornings.) I had this every day this week, so that was quite a lot. For the first three weeks there are some introductory courses, which take place every day. When term starts properly in October I will only have 2 or 3 days of lectures per week.
The two courses for which I had lectures this week were Algebra and Geometry, and Complex Analysis. The first is all stuff I already know from Part III. Sometimes it is interesting to see it taught from a different (more geometric) perspective, and sometimes it is just boring. The Complex Analysis one is not really relevant to what I am interested in, but I thought I would go along just to broaden my knowledge.
The lectures are all in French, but the lecturers speak reasonably clearly so that is rarely a problem. Reading what they have written can sometimes be harder, and they don’t write full sentences on the board as lecturers usually do in Cambridge. That means that I’m not learning how to write maths in French as I had hoped, and I often don’t know what to write to fill in the gaps in what they wrote on the board.
There are about 18 people attending the lectures. The audience at the Algebra and Geometry ones is quite international. I think I am the only native English speaker, but the majority of the audience are probably more comfortable speaking English than French. There are more French people at the analysis lectures.
Tags france, languages, lectures, m2, paris
Posted by martin on
Saturday, 12 September 2009 at 15:49
On Wednesday I arrived in Paris. I am here to do the second year of a masters (French, and all other Bologna Process-compliant, masters are two years) in number theory and geometry, at the Université Paris-Sud. Getting here without flying was quite a journey - I got the ferry to Stranraer, train through Scotland and England to London, then stayed overnight with someone in London. I got the Eurostar the next morning, followed by a 40 minute journey on the RER (Paris suburban train).
I live on an island in the river Yvette. It is not very obviously an island, since the river is pretty tiny and the island is ten times the width of the river. Despite the river being so small, it is in a big valley. The university goes up the north side of this valley, and above that there is just trees. Most of Paris is somewhere over the other side of this ridge, so you wouldn’t really know you are on the edge of a big city. The towns of Bures-sur-Yvette (where I live) and Orsay (at the other end of the university) go up the south side of the valley. Orsay is 15-20 minutes walk away, and has slightly more shops than Bures. There are a lot of big, quite mixed, trees everywhere.
Today I climbed up the through Bures to the top of the hill, where you come to Les Ulis, a New Town-style suburb with a big shopping centre. According to the map, this is the very southern edge of Paris - after the shopping centre you come to the countryside. It took me about an hour to come down from Les Ulis, probably longer to go up, although I didn’t really know where I was going either time.
I have spent the past few days learning my way around and sorting various things - registering with the university, opening a bank account, etc. I don’t understand everything that people say to me, and sometimes I have trouble explaining myself, but the people I have talked to have been very patient.
Tags france, paris
Posted by martin on
Sunday, 15 March 2009 at 22:28
Another term has just finished. This term I studied:
- Elliptic Curves (quite easy; major objects of study in algebraic number theory)
- Modular Forms (a bit harder; more central objects in algebraic number theory)
- Curves and Abelian Varieties (quite hard - only a handful of people did it; this is really algebraic geometry, but very relevant to number theory)
- Complex Manifolds (differential geometry, so not my main line but handy background; I didn’t try to follow this one in detail)
I have also done some work on an essay (worth the same credit as a lecture course) on Complex Multiplication (which is about a special type of elliptic curves). I gave a seminar on this last Friday but beyond the content of that I don’t know much about it yet - I shall have to work on it over the holiday.
Other big news is that I have a place at the Université Paris Sud in Orsay for the second year of a French masters next year (because getting funding to go straight to a PhD in Paris would be a problem), and this week I heard I have got the Rouse Ball Travelling Studentship in Mathematics from Trinity to pay for it.
Tags paris, partiii