Spring Project Conclusion

Due to COVID, I had to change some of the details of my project, but the idea remained the same; learn the basics of cooking various dishes. Since I was already at home and had cooking supplies easily available to me, as well as already having ingredients to cook with, more of the project focused on just preparing meals and less on gathering resources. I started by looking for recipes to cook, but the following day was the first day everyone panicked for supplies so I didn’t end up getting to cook those recipes. Instead, I used ingredients that we already had around the house to cook five dishes: A chicken dinner, a batch of muffins, a pasta meal (including homemade pasta sauce), waffles, and a hamburger/fries dinner. In terms of managing a self directed project, I don’t really think there were any issues. While I waited until a little later than I probably should have to do most of the cooking, I still had plenty of time to complete the project while only dedicating around an hour a day towards it. For the year long capstone, however, I should make sure I have specific deadlines set for myself throughout the year. All in all, I’d say the project was helpful and enjoyable, because I got to learn how to cook a bunch of tasty meals (and eat them too) that I’ll be able to cook once I’m no longer living on campus a year from now.

Spring Project Introduction

For some background, for the STEM Scholars Program, we have to complete a 10 hour project where we learn a specific skill or create some product so as to prepare us for the capstone research project next year. For my project, I will be learning how to cook a few dishes that I’ll be able to make and eat when I move off campus in a little over a year. In particular, I have several dietary restrictions I have to manage, so it’s often challenging to find recipes that I’ll be able to have. By doing this project, I hope to have a solid variety of meals I’ll be able to choose from in a few years when I no longer have a meal plan.

To be more specific about the final outcome, by the end of the project, I’ll have found at least four different dishes that I’ll be able to prepare with relative ease and limited supplies when living off campus. I will then actually gather the supplies and cook two of them. During the project, I intend to consult Alex Demagall since he has a lot of experience in cooking.

My estimated hours are as follows:

– Researching possible dishes and recording recipes: 4 hours

– Acquiring supplies and ingredients: 2 hours

– Cooking the dishes (and cleaning up, etc.): 2 hours each, total of 4 hours

Diversity and Inclusion Event – Halloween Around the World

Two weeks ago on the night before Halloween, I attended a very interesting presentation/discussion on Halloween around the world. It was put on by one of the RA’s in Houck House, and they had assembled several documentaries on the cultural development of Halloween and other fall time traditions across the globe.

It first began by talking about All Saints Day and All Hallows Eve and how those traditions ultimately evolved into Halloween. It was interesting to hear about the background of our celebration here in the US, since it seems like a very arbitrary holiday compared to some of the others.

However, it was way more interesting when they starting talking about other countries’ holidays. The presentation specifically focused on Day of the Dead and the Asian festival called The Hungry Ghost Festival. While I had heard of Day of the Dead before (as it is quite often discussed and celebrating during Spanish classes that I’ve taken over the past few years), I had never heard of the Hungry Ghost Festival before. It was cool to get to learn about and observe another holiday that I’d never heard of before and to compare and contrast it to the celebrations and traditions we have here in America.

This event in particular was pretty small since it was mainly intended for Houston/Houck House residents, so only around ten people showed up. Nevertheless, we had some interesting discussions and reflections during the presentation, and it was nice getting to hear what other people’s opinions and ideas were about this topic. Most of the discussion questions between the videos were analyzing the connections between the traditions even if they on the surface appear to be (and often times are in fact) very different. For example, one specific thing we talked about and discussed is how many of the traditions that openly talk about death take place in the fall (since all three of the main holidays we talked about, I.e. Halloween, Day of the Dead, and Hungry Ghost Festival take place at the same time of the year and all have somewhat similar themes of death and/or “spooky” things). It was interesting to think about how the season and perhaps the typical weather influenced that; we settled on the conclusion that since the weather is transitioning from being warm to cold and chilly, and the days being shorter and getting dark earlier (feeling somewhat “spooky”) ultimately led to the fall time traditions during the late October season being centered around death. However, different countries view the topic differently. For example, the Day of the Dead is a happy time for celebration where a family’s ancestors are remembered and join them for a day; this reflects they’re strong emphasis on family in their culture.

Overall it was a fun and interesting experience learning about various cultures around the world and how they celebrated the early fall season. I’m glad I took the time to take part in this event, and in the future I may look for other similar events to learn more about how our culture relates to culture in other countries across the globe.

Campus Resource – Student Legal Services

Towards the beginning of the semester, I visited Student Legal Services for help with writing a HIPAA release and a Health Care Power of Attorney in case an emergency happens. While I didn’t urgently need to do this, it was good to get it done and out of the way in case something actually does happen to me, but also it was helpful to know that I have that resource there for me in the future in case anything does ever happen and I need to use it. While I only needed assistance with those two things, they also offer help with wills, living wills, general power of attorney, and obviously case by case legal assistance as well.

It’s amazing that we’re able to get professional legal assistance for practically free here as a student. The whole process was simple and easy to do, and took almost no time as well. I just had to schedule an appointment online (which I did over the summer, since I had been planning to take advantage of this resource once I got here), and then essentially just show up at the appointment time. During the appointment they were kind and helpful, and they were patient when I wanted to make sure I understood all of the fancy legal text and wasn’t signing something I didn’t want to sign. They also on the other hand made it very easy to fill out the more generic parts of the documents which significantly expedited the process. Student Legal Services is really far from Houston House (which is where I live), however, so I had to take the COTA to get there.

Speaking of which, the COTA buses have also been very helpful the several times I’ve had to go really far to south campus and/or the Short North. With our BuckID we can ride them for free, so we don’t have to worry about always having a means to pay for transportation, and they also come around very frequently so I’ve never had to wait too long for one of the buses to arrive. Having the ability to quickly get across campus without too much effort is pretty cool. It’s also cool how we can get to almost anywhere we want in Columbus using them as well. While I haven’t had to use them for anywhere but the Short North or transportation around campus yet, it’s nice to know that if I am ever planning on going somewhere too far to walk I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to physically get there.

Overall, as a student here we have tons of resources available to us, both academic and non-academic. Student Legal Services and COTA are just two examples, but there’s also things like the CCS, the Wexner Medical Center (although that’s open to anyone, it’s nice to have it here on campus in case emergencies happen since it means we’re within walking distance of a hospital), the Student Wellness Center and so much more. While I don’t anticipate needing to use Student Legal Services again while I’m here, you never know and it’s good to know I have it if I need it.

Campus Seminar – Commutative Algebra

This week, I attended a seminar on Commutative Algebra. The Math department has seminars available almost every day it seems, and I’ve tried to attend a few in the past, but typically they’ve been a little over my head. However, this seminar I was able to understand pretty well, so that was pretty cool. The topic was on a specific axiomatization of a certain class of rings, and I was able to follow most of it (with a few hiccups here and there). In particular, there’s a lot of terminology in Commutative Algebra and it was especially nice and refreshing to hear people talk about these ideas again since it helped me recall things that I had forgotten and get a better understanding of the elementary topics in the subject.

While I was the only undergraduate at the seminar, it was nice to be able to learn more about what the current state of the art is in many topics and to be able to experience and observe how things work in these seminars, since I’ll likely be going into an academic setting in my future so I’ll be attending and giving many of these kinds of talks pretty soon. I do think it is important for undergraduates to attend these kinds of seminars and lectures, since it gives them exposure to more advanced topics without demanding much from them or requiring them to understand everything being discussed; however, I think it is important as well to be careful to attend mostly seminars on topics that you have at least some background in, because otherwise it will be a waste of time if you never understand anything being presented. This particular seminar seemed to be part of a series of seminars on Commutative Algebra, and I think I’ll probably continue to attend it for the rest of the year. The group seemed very nice and supportive, and the topics they have planned are exciting, so I’m looking forward to it.

I also met several math graduate students, and I hadn’t met any math graduate students before, so that was cool since I’ll probably be in their shoes in a few years. In particular, I met a grad student who invited me to the Directed Reading Program here at OSU, which (while I don’t know much about it yet), seems to be a program where a graduate student in math is paired with a undergraduate and the graduate student mentors the undergraduate in a sort of self-study of some book or topic. The topic I’ll be doing is Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry, and I know very little about modern geometric topics, so I’m pretty excited to start learning some Algebraic Geometry.

The Math department offers plenty of other weekly seminars, and while most of them are on topics that I don’t know enough about to fully grasp, a few of them aren’t so I might look through the list and try to find a few that intrigue me and start attending them weekly. I know for sure I’m going to continue to attend this particular seminar on Commutative Algebra, but perhaps there are other seminars that I would benefit from attending.

Academic Resource – Office Hours

This semester, by far my most interesting class is Honors Linear Algebra and Differential Equations. That seems kind of surprising at first, considering I’ve already taken both a linear algebra class and a differential equations class, however the professor does a great job at revealing the subject from different perspectives that I had never seen before. Because our midterm was coming up, I went to one of the office hours to prepare.

The experience was overall very interesting. There were about ten of us (a few were cut out from the picture accidentally) there, and we talked about many topics related to math. One of the more interesting topics was the effect that budgeting has on decisions made by the math department. He said there currently isn’t a masters program for math offered by the school because it was running at an economic loss, so they weren’t willing to continue it; however, there are a bunch of classes that are only offered really in our masters program that then are probably not going to be taught. This is a little amusing (but perhaps a little disturbing), but there are several fields of math that don’t actually have an courses offered by our university because of this. This led us to our next discussion, which was about why we don’t have any topology (and barely any geometric subjects at all) in the math track. It seems like there really wasn’t any particular reason why we didn’t, we just mainly focused on other aspects of math.

On the other hand, the past few days in class we’ve done some very interesting content involving universal properties, and we’ve talked about horological algebra a few times as well. I’ll probably be going to office hours a few more times soon because I’d like to learn more about those topics and how they relate to what we’re learning in class. Office hours are a great resource not only for asking questions specifically about what we’re learning in class, but also asking questions about connections between topics and fields that you probably wouldn’t ask during lectures (since it’d interrupt the flow of the lecture and they wouldn’t be able to finish all of the content, etc.). It’s nice to go to a university where there are plenty of such resources available.

I’d also be very interested in doing something like being a TA or an MSLC tutor. I really like trying to explain interesting math and science concepts to people, but I’m often not super good at it, so it’d be great practice for that. It also would be experience for if I do continue to pursue math in an academic setting, since I’d probably have to do a fair bit of teaching over the years.

While Ohio State is a massive school with many students, there are more than enough resources available to make the experience personalized and individualized to one’s needs. In addition to countless clubs and student organizations, there are lots of academic resources such as office hours to help us grow as students. I’ll try to make the most of the opportunities available to me while I’m here!

Reading Classics – Student Organization/Club

Three weeks ago, I joined the “Reading Classics” group, and it’s been a blast every week so far. Contrary to what the title might suggest, it’s actually a math club where we read about classical mathematics and mathematicians. Each week a fellow student researches the works of a specific mathematician and gives a presentation to the rest of us.

At first it might not sound too fun, and perhaps a little lame even, to study how classical mathematicians did things in often vastly more convoluted ways than what we would do today. However, the comparison between their methods and our machinery can be quite interesting. This week, the talk was about “Egyptian Fractions”, both about how they were used circa 1500 BCE and how they relate to topics of more modern interest. What really fascinated me was how simple the first problem he posed seemed to us today, and yet how complicated it’s solution was back in their time. The problem was to “find the number such that the sum of it’s quarter, it’s half, and itself is ten”. When we write it today in our algebraic notation, the solution just pops out immediately; write x + 0.5x + 0.25x =10, factor, and divide by 7/4. It seems so easy and obvious that it should be hard to miss, but that’s because we’re using notation and machinery that evolved over thousands of years to make solving such problems “trivial”. (For reference, if you haven’t heard the word “machinery” in math, it’s referring to methods or ideas that take complicated or challenging situations and transform them into a vastly simpler and easier context; in this example, the machinery is the ability to write the problem as an algebraic expression, and then manipulate that equation to isolate what we’re looking for).

While this seems like a trivial example, it really made me appreciate how simple a problem can become when you view it in different ways. I couldn’t help but wonder how complicated our methods will appear to mathematicians a hundred or a thousand years from now. It somehow feels like our ways of solving some problems are sometimes so easy and natural that you couldn’t make it any simpler, and yet there other times there are problems that are simple to pose yet seemingly impossible to solve. I wish I could fast forward five hundred years and see what machinery will come along that will make us look like “fools” with our convoluted techniques.

It’s also really fun to just get together with a group of people who love math and “geek out” together. Quite a few people in my math class are also in it with me, so I’m getting to know my peers a lot better in the process. It’s also pretty cool to get to meet many of the upperclassmen in the major as well, since it gives you some perspective as to where we’re headed. And finally, it gives a great opportunity to research a topic closely and excellent practice presenting to friendly and forgiving group. Overall, it’s a great time, both for learning more about what we study all throughout our classes and also just to hang out and talk math with friends.

Artifacts

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About Me

Hi, I’m Torey Hilbert and I’m a math major here at OSU. Obviously I’m interested in math, but I’m also interested in programming, statistics, and data analytics. In fact, after my undergraduate, my current plan is to go to grad school for statistics, and from there either go into an academic setting or into data science. I hope to have a great time and learn a lot here at The Ohio State University! Here’s my resume.