Tonight I'm gonna have myself a real good time

Assignment 1 was distributed today, due on the 20th, worth 1% of the final grade. Now I can finally stop panicking and do some work! The assignment looks eerily familiar; maybe it's the same as last year's assignment 1, which of course I would have done at some point. There are only seven questions, so there's really no reason to be working on it beyond about next Wednesday.

Today's lecture introduced the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, meaning it's exactly a year since I was first impressed by Chris's pronunciation of foreign mathematicians' names. All together now: Ko-shee Sh-varts [to rhyme with "toe cheese hearts"]. Beautiful.

We also encountered another one of those priceless bits of mathematical jargon, this time the positive definite Hermitian-symmetric sesquilinear form. Chris recommended we use it to start conversations at parties. Certainly it's not much use for anything else - if anyone wanted to refer to this thing they'd just call it the Hermitian inner product. The longer phrase explicitly describes all five of its properties, which is hardly necessary for everyday use.

Tonight, if I have time, I shall start le assignment!