This summer I’m going to be doing math research with Bob Strichartz this summer. We’re going to be trying to develop a theory of analysis on fractals and other rough spaces.

This was the only summer program I applied to. The previous summer, my mom got me a job working as a research assistant at catholic university’s vitreous state lab. I wasn’t particularly productive there. The one good thing that came of that was that I began reading textbooks independently. I started out reading David Griffiths excellent Introduction to Quantum Mechanics textbook. I might do a fuller review later, here’s a wonderful set of commentary and solutions.

I’ve met many many other people who learned differential equations from griffiths. It’s rather embarassing how common this is. It could be that this is the first class in which solving differential equations is “expected” of us students. Many of the people who I knew took differential equations (ex: Sascha) forgot everything about it, but everybody who’s used differential equations in quantum knows a thing or two about actually solving them. The next best resource is definitely Farlow’s Partial Differential Equations for Scientists and Engineers.

Anyways, at the beginning of spring semester, I knew that I needed to apply to some sort of summer program. I didn’t particularly want to, it was much more of a push than a pull. I was afraid of not having anything to do during the summer. When I was told that I missed the deadline for Cornell’s summer math program, I was carrying Vivian’s books at the time. I dropped the books. I then quickly talked to Bob and applied to his group, and I was fortunately accepted.

I had a tremendous amount of difficulty working through the background reading, and now here I am starting the first real week of work after the background lectures. Wish me luck!