Posted by Martin Orr on
Thursday, 18 May 2006 at 09:26
Two weeks today until exams; the past papers seem to be reasonably doable - at least when you are used to olympiad problems that take hours each. We are still getting some lectures as well, of which the most interesting and hardest are on topology; I have been spending quite a bit of time thinking about this and learning it by discovery. (Very briefly, topology is the study of continuous maps: you start off with some space or surface, then map each point from that space to a point in some other space; the map is continuous if points that started off close together end up close together.)
There have been three TCMS concerts in the past couple of weeks, including a special one in the Wren Library instead of our normal venue of the chapel. That meant lots of moving of chairs from the chapel store to the library. It's a nice building but a slightly odd concert venue; actually both the Wren Library and the chapel are very long and thin, which seems to me a strange shape for a chapel.
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Martin
Tags
exams, tcms, trinity, tripos
Posted by Martin Orr on
Monday, 24 April 2006 at 17:02
Last term I got out of the habit of posting; sorry about that. You will consequently have missed that I have become Membership Secretary for the Trinity College Music Society and Bookshop Manager for the Archimedeans (University maths society). The first is not a terribly difficult task, which means maintaining the members database and making membership cards for new members, and also stewarding at a few concerts per term. We had a committee meeting this afternoon, held on the Fellows' Bowling Green thanks to the sunny weather (although it is not yet very warm).
A major event this term will be exams. I have four exams at the start of June. We are expected to work pretty hard before that, doing a year's worth of past papers each week, with two supervisions a week to go through them. There are also four weeks of lectures, but these are not examined until next year and you can choose not to go to some of them until next year. In any case, we will get no supervisions on them this term.
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Martin
Tags
archimedeans, tcms, tripos
Posted by Martin Orr on
Wednesday, 09 November 2005 at 08:30
I'm pretty busy at the moment, largely due to the fact that I am going to Stockholm at the weekend for the ACM programming contest. This is a competition in which universities send teams of three, broadly similar to the IOI except that you work as a team and the trip is much shorter (only three days). Trinity is sending two teams; the one I'm on also has Paul Jeffreys, UK/GB IMO and IOI medallist, and Mark Thompson, GB IOI medallist and member of the UK IMO squad.
As well as training for the competition itself, it has also meant I have had to reschedule a supervision from Friday to this afternoon. With two supervisions yesterday as well that has meant a lot of work the past few days, but fortunately it is all done now.
What else have I been doing? My parents came to visit Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, which was great. On Sunday there was the Freshers' Concert in the Master's Lodge: anyone in the first year could audition to perform in this, and we had a range of stunning performances on piano, violin, viola, bassoon and voice. The first year choral scholars also did a couple of pieces - Cole Porter and something similar, very different from their usual chapel repertoire!
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Martin
Tags
cambridge, ioi, music, tcms, trinity