I have a file somewhere on my computer called “Books”. It lists all of the books I’ve read since the summer, all of the books I’m currently reading, and all of the books I want to read. Every few weeks, inspired by a good review or a piqued curiosity, I go on Amazon or AbeBooks and buy something new to read, and my list gets longer.

This semester, instead of a full complement of CS or math classes, I’m taking a few liberal arts classes in government and philosophy. One of the classes I’m taking, Constitutional Interpretation (which is really constitutional law), is considered one of the most—if not the most—challenging classes offered by the government department. The professor usually teaches in the law school, but occasionally teaches undergraduate classes; when he does, he usually teaches them the same way he teaches them in law school.

Last week, I wrote an article called “Get Back Up”. You can read it here.

Later that week, I learned that the post had received an absurd view count. Most of our articles get anywhere from 50 to 300 views in a week; this one received close to 4,500.

This morning, I woke up to a notification from my phone. The email was from a recruiter from a company I was interviewing with, and the subject line read “Thanks from <company>”.

Consider the following problem: given a particular Shakespearean work, rewrite it entirely using nothing more than the 100 most common words in the English language.

The problem is daunting: Shakespeare invented a considerable amount of modern English (especially idioms), and so replacing the phrases that he himself pioneered with something more mundane can seem like an extraordinarily difficult task.

And now for something a little different: let’s talk about version control.

Let’s say you have a file—an essay, maybe, or a spreadsheet—that you edit a lot. You want to make sure that you always save your changes to the disk, so that when you update something the file reflects that change. Pretty obvious stuff.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I wanted to get involved with biology research. So I found a professor who was working on something I found interesting, reached out to his lab, and asked if I could do an internship there for a summer. Turns out I couldn’t—I was 15 at the time, and regulations dictate that anyone touching the lab equipment has to be at least 18 years old (or, in very special cases, 16 with a boatload of waivers signed). So research that summer was a no-go.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft had a lunch for Turing Scholars in the GDC. It was an interesting experience — pretty standard as far as lunches go, with free pizza predictably running out in 20 minutes, a couple of tables with different conversations clustered around a visiting engineer or recruiter, and of course, the perennial problem: no one-on-one time available to talk to the recruiter.

This is my fifth (of eight) semesters at UT. Since adding my math degree during my first semester, I have taken 6 math classes and 2 math-y CS classes (311 and 331, if you’re wondering). This semester, I’m taking two more of each, bringing me up to a total of 8 and 4, respectively. (Proof that I am in fact a math major.)

The science of mathematics is based on taking existing facts (theorems, lemmas, axioms, and so on) and figuring out how to make them into new and different facts, otherwise known as the proof—the bread and butter of mathematics.

Where do you see yourself in five years?