A somewhat better afternoon, and the musings inspired thereby

My combinatorics professor is awesome. Wish there were more like him in this department.

He posed a problem toward the end of class today with a difficult solution which he then planned to explain to us, only to have a student point out that there was a much simpler and more intuitive solution. Since we all (all seven or so of us--I'm not sure why so few people are taking this class, but it's kinda nice) felt there wasn't much point in going over the difficult solution after that, someone or other suggested we spend the last half hour of class outdoors, taking advantage of the Lovely Spring Weather (sorry, emmett_the_sane) that has so suddenly descended upon us this week. On our way out there we were joshing the guy who'd solved the problem a bit--he joked about getting his solution published--and that led the prof, as we lounged on the grass, to dispense some very welcome advice as to just how one goes about finding useful and interesting math problems to tackle that no one else has solved yet. As one of my fellow students said, they just don't tell you this kind of thing during your undergraduate years. I've certainly never had a prof before who took the time to talk to the whole class about not just the material covered in the course, but the business of being a mathematician.

'Fraid it's too little too late, though, to make me want to stick with math past graduation even if I had the grades for it. Even now that I know better how one Does Mathematics, it still doesn't feel like my bag. I enjoy playing with math as much as ever, but I don't have the discipline to work with it. If I tried to tackle an open problem, I'd get bored and frustrated if I couldn't figure out the solution right away. I should've realized this years ago--my impatience with many kinds of puzzles ought to have tipped me off--but during my first couple of years as an undergrad my issues with mathematics on the whole were masked by my issues with simply being able to function; I couldn't tell the difference between "I don't wanna do math" and "I don't wanna get out of bed in the morning, let alone do math."

Anyway, I wound up chatting with Quick Solution Boy (I still have no idea what his name is) for a while after class ended and everyone else drifted away. We found ourselves exchanging some surprisingly personal information--I suspect we were flirting a bit, though not, I think, with serious intent. It's not often these days that I find myself getting better acquainted with anyone outside of my already-existing social network, and it's nice to know I still have the ability to socialize at random if I choose to, but on the other hand it still doesn't seem to be all that productive an activity. People out there in the Real World for the most part appear to have baffling attitudes about things like trust and honesty in human interaction, just to take the most salient example.