Badminton Champ

Dear Sumant :),

Finally I won the men's double badminton tournament here in Rec Centre. Last time I came close to winning when I paired with Arvind, however he developed serious cramps in the final and we had to forfeit the game. This time I paired with Al rosi and we won against the very same competitors. I am pleased with the way I played, David has cut a DVD of it and I plan to take a look at it. Since my fruit diet I have improved a lot in my game and the way I can smash is pleasing to me. Never knew that a healthy fruit diet could do so many wonders to one's game. Last to last year I won the mixed doubles tournament when I paired with Juliane Schneider but we didn't get anything. Not even a certificate to verify that we indeed win. I especially feel for her because even after going back to Austria, she mailed me back inquiring whether we will get something or not ! Enough bragging from me. The next few weeks are going to be exciting, as I will be having a lot of tests. I already had one yesterday and I think I did well in that. Today, I also went to do grocery shopping and brought lots of healthy fruits and vegetables. I am curious about bottle gourd (or lauki ). Lets see how it turns out to be.

Rest is ok
Have an exciting Halloween
Sumant Sumant

Baba nam kevalam

Dear Sumant,

Ah.. This music is awesome. I happened to stumble upon the website of "Anand Marg". Its one of those neo Hindu movements which aim to seek the resurgence of meditation movement so deeply embedded in Hindu group of philosophy". I use the word Hindu group to hammer the point that Hinduism is not a religion, its a philosophy of living. Where everyone is free to explore to seek out the truth. It was always like that before Islamist came to India and started to call these group of people as under one umbrella religion. And to these free thinking people's dismay the whole world now thinks them as follower of a religion. This has lead to ritual things among these free thinking people and they have forgotten that they were free thinkers who produced all time greatest philosophers like Buddha, Jain, Nanak among others who keep reminding that seek the truth. But I do believe that movements like Hare Krishna, Anand Marg are in some way helping these people to rediscover their free thinking again and get out of the shackles of the ritualistic religion that they were following. Ultimately every one should have a will and opportunity to explore and follow what uplifts and spiritually enhances their brief stay on earth.
Right now this "Baba nam kevalam" music is being played on my six speaker set connected to my lap top and I must say its pretty wonderful music. I am experiencing the kind of joy when I first heard one of my favorite "Om mani padme hum" music at Keylong in himachal pradesh. Simply awesome music :). If this has stirred the curiosity in you, I encourage you to visit the site of Anand Marg and click on the section kirtan. I think this is the very first song there.

Best regards
Sumant Sumant

Poker

Dear Sumant,

You know that I don't like to gamble money. Being a math major helps you to know that betting is not a safe proposition. On the other hand it does tells you that you can win if you play smartly. Problems like Gambler ruin and Stochastic processes can help you to determine when to get out of the game and how to raise your bets. I has also sparked my interest into Poker. My dad maintained that in collge I will learn playing cards. I didn't do it when I was in college in India and haven't here. But learning is more of an intellectual curosity and ability to use your knowledge in an applied setting. So today I got excited about learning poker and went to Jenn's house. There I met my old buddies Justin, Andrew, Joe, David and Ray. There was a cardinal game and ray was more interested in that. So lily joined for him. I was under the tutelage of Justin. He showed me how to play. The last time I tried poker was in Train while coming from California to Chicago. They were bunch of fellow pessengers who got together to play Texas Holdem Poker. but I had forgotten that stuff. Poker is a fun game which involves beside knowing the rules is the alertness to read your oponents move and phyche. I know its addictive but I plan to get better at it without getting sucked into the money proposition.
Best regards
Sumant Sumant

Diwali Night, Pumpkin Carving

Dear Sumant,

Before going to Makanda fest I went to Diwali celebration. This was one of the best organized Diwali night by Indian Student Association. With $5 a ticket it was definitely encouraging. The food was cooked by students and it included Veg Biryani, Pulao, Aloo Subzi, Raita (Yogurt with vegetables) and Mango Shake. It was a pretty good lunch that carried me through the whole evening. Kudos to the Indian Student Association for doing a great job.

In the evening I went out to cookout, I was thinking of skipping it first but than I had promised Sarah that I will show up there. It was fun. I along with Shizuka, Pe Jian and Mandy participated in Pumpkin Carving and did a good job. The best part was the Apple bobbing. Here are some pictures to get you an idea of that.

Rest is great, have fun !
Sumant Sumant

Bourbon Knights Makanda Fest

Dear Sumant,

Yesterday was a busy day. One of the better known band in Carbondale was playing at Vulture Fest in Makanda. The first time I got introduced to them when in summer I was hanging in Hangar 9 pub. I liked the music, its a blue grass band and has plenty of energy to keep you absorbed. Since then I have been a fan of that band. A word about Makanda. Its a pretty small town and yes its pretty. Its like a valley with a downtown consisting of a handful of shops and a railroad cuts right through the middle of it. The village holds it annual vulture fest event in month of October and is famous for the handicraft items. Look at some of these pictures and you will get an idea about it. I also met Joe and Ray there who were hanging around with Jane there and I got invited to a poker night at Jane's place.

Best regards
Sumant Sumant

250th blog post and Golf

Dear Sumant,

Today is my 250th post on this blog ! I marked it off by playing golf and boy I really swinged well (That's a sign that I am going to play again !!). I went out with Akina and Pui to Crab orchard lake's golf course and it was an awesome experience. I also got a new book on Algebra and Geometry and I am planning on reading it tonight. Dr Porter today talked about more of generating functions and recursions. I have to work on more recursion problems and then I plan to write some recursive functions in Maple. Dr. Parker went over the Quotient Groups. Also today Dr. Kocik substituted for Dr. Ban and his enthusiasm was infectious. He talked about Eigen Values and Eigen Vectors so that has pumped me to explore further using the software and books. I also phoned Surender Uncle who is currently staying in Texas and had a long chit chat about various things. In all a pretty good day.

Best regards
Sumant Sumant

Apologizing and PREP site

I love visiting bookstores and even if I visit walmart I make it a point to spend some time reading the new arrivals and it usually takes me anywhere between half and hr to 45 minutes to finish a book and that way I am able to console myself that my trip to grocery store wasn't a waste of time. Today I came across a book on apology and I was glad that I took notice of that and spend almost half an hr reading it. Its a nice book and it definitely helped me appreciate some of things I have overlooked and I really want to apologize to someone whose birthday is fast approaching.
I also discovered some neat tutorials of MAA (Mathematical Association of America) under the PREP program. Check it out.

Differntiable of abs(polynomial)

Dear Sumant,

Its Tuesday noon and I am in Math, Neckers lab. I have two homework due tomorrow including Linear Algebra and Abstract Algebra. Yesterday while trying to help Yanagi, I came across one question which was about finding the derivative of a function in terms of absolute value. I think it was neat because at first glance you just try to dismiss that as something which is not differentiable, but then its not differentiable only at the cusp. So for example abs(x) is not differentiable at 0 but its differentiable at all other points. Therefore its derivative can be written as x/abs(x). The same idea can then be generalize to find the derivative of abs(polynomial). The derivative of which will be polynomial/abs(polynomial) * derivate of polynomial. In past several lectures I came across the general definition of determinant. Learned about cosets, normal subgroups and quotient group. The counting method with generating functions is pretty interesting. The book on Visual linear algebra has some interesting use of Maple software and I am very eager to do the cryptology part of it. I have already installed all the tutorials for Maple so I can look forward to some very interesting days ahead in using Maple.

Thats for now
Sumant Sumant

Golden Temple

One of my good old buddy Ravinder just sent me the picture of Golden Temple and I cannot refrain from posting it here. I still haven't been there. Its one of the holiest place in India in Amritsar.

Eventful week and Nishit's return to India

Dear Sumant,

Its Friday evening and I am in a pretty good mood because of the news of Dr. Yunus Mohd. having won the Noble Peace Prize for this Grameen Bank. You can read my last entry where I expounded on why I am such a big fan of him. This week was productive and its also the week when Nishit finally left Carbondale. In the past few months Nishit I had become good friends. We share similar view on Vegetarianism and were striving to have a better and healthy diet. He introduced me to "Fit for life" book which made be radically think about my diet and that was sometime in February. Since than my diet has taken a 180 degree turn. I am eating far more fruits and vegetables and have controlled my intake of chocolate and soda. I am loving it.
In my math front its getting exciting. We got introduced to generating functions. I am beginning to use more of "GAP" software in my abstract algebra. Dr. Parker is an excellent teacher and its absolute fun taking class with him. On the linear algebra front we finished the introduction to determinant and now have started the Diagonalization problem. I found several good links for both Linear Algebra and Abstract algebra. Which aid in learning these concepts. Today I will play badminton and plan on working on Linear Algebra stuff.

That's for today
Smiles
Sumant

Mohd. Yunus ! Congratulations for Nobel Peace Prize

Dear Sumant,

I am extremely happy for Dr. Mohd. Yunus for having won this years Nobel Peace Prize. He is the kind of person I deeply respect because he is able to positively effect the life of so many people around the world. I have so far tried unsucessfully to let my papa follow his example and open a micro credit facility in his native place. I am proud of the work he is doing and sincerely believe that bringing micro credit facility would have an expediting effect on the growth of the place. Mohd. Yunus is one guy who didn't wait for the govt. to help, he knew what he wanted to do and how he could do it. I first got introduced to his work way back in 90s, I think it was an article in Time Magazine. Since then I fervently believe that implementing his model could successfully ameliorate the condition of millions of poor. Its a rock solid concept and can be easily set up anywhere. Hopefully the Nobel Prize recognition will encourage my father to take a leaf from his work and start a micro credit facility there.

Best regards
Sumant

Learning new things in Linear Algebra

I always get excited when I learn something new. For example I recently learned that standard basis for polynomials is 1, x, x^2, x^3 ... and so on. For a matrix of size n x m there are n*m set of vectors which form the standard basis. This is something different from anything I learned in my first course in linear algebra. Here you don't have each vector as a tuple of some k things. So this leads to a fundamental shift in the way we think of functions. Now with just 3 basis 1, x and x^2 (note that either of these doesn't have components like for example basis e1,e2,e3 in R3 have e1 = (1,0,0), e2 - (0,1,0) and e3 = (0,0,1). Thus 1 is just 1, x is just x and x^2 is just x^2) one can think of a 3 dimensional space and each point of this space denotes a polynomial. For example the polynomial 3+7*x-21*x^2 is 3 units on axis 1, 7 units on axis x and -21 units on axis x^2.
The other fascinating concept is that of Linear Transformation. This tells you how you can map vectors from one vector space to another. Usually the notation for this is T:V->W. Where T denotes the linear transformation from vector space V to vector space W. Thus T takes input as vectors from the set V and maps it to the vectors in W. So T is just like a function however it doesn't take any vector it takes only those which satisfy the condition of T(x+y) = T(x) +T(y) and T(c.x)= c T(x) where x,y belongs to Vector over a field F and c belongs to F. At first shot one might not appreciate that use of the basis 1,x,x^2.. might enable one to do differentiation. Yes one can define a Transformation Matrix which can do operation like differentiation. I think it may be because when we think of differentiation we think that its not a linear transformation but its a basis which are non linear. What we are doing is just a c.x kind of operation. Other important concept which fascinated me was how we can map a matrix to a element or a vector with n component to a matrix. Lots of exciting things and that is all making me happy these days !! Yay yay for Linear Algebra !!

But I think you are right for Amul Chocolate..

Dear Sumant,

While coming to this place at computer lab in Faner hall a jingle of Amul Chocolate was humming in my mind. "A gift for someone you love". I recollected this advertisement on Doordarshan I don't know but after a very long time. This was because I went to IG and bought a Belgian chocolate which was packaged to be given to some other person. I was also thinking why Amul no longer plays that add because it used to start with. I am too old for sthg but than someone else would come and support it and say .."but I think you are right for amul chocolate". Reinforcing the age excutis that person had.

thats for now
bye and regards
Sumant Sumant

Mona lisa Smile

Dear Sumant,
I happened to see this movie yesterday and I must confess this was one of the best movie. I guess the reason for it could be that I very much identify with the character of this movie. People like me who believe that they can change the world will love it. Its a story set in 1950s when the women were newly admitted to college. Its about the social conditioning at that era in spite of being brilliant at their studies how they were forfeiting their careers and how one professor with vision make them realize their potential. I loved it and will give it 5 stars to this movie on my amazon review.

Cheers and best regards
Sumant Sumant