The 70th thing. New blog?

I am now a PhD Student! Yay! :D Now I'm going to see if I can make \(Math\) stuff appear here. $$e^{i\pi}+1=0.$$

The 69th thing. A thought near midnight.

You know but a prick of a pin, and you think that's all the pain in the world.

The 68th thing. A memory.

My cousin and I used to hang out a lot when we were kids. He used to live in another city and we would play a lot of games whenever he would come over to visit. Naturally after playing the entire day, we would feel like having some snacks, so we would ask our mothers to either make something tasty for us, or for some money so that we could go to a shop nearby and buy something to eat. It so happened that one day we were given some money. We were excited at the thought of buying a blue Ruffle's Lays 20 rupees packet (now known popularly as Lays Magic Masala). The shop that we generally go to is maybe three or four hundred feet from where we lived. The road is lined with houses on either side. There is one particular house where the owners have a dog, and my cousin is extremely scared of dogs. The dog usually barks at everyone who walks by, and my cousin and I are used to it, so we find it easy to ignore it. That day though, as we were passing by, the dog was nowhere to be seen. The compound wall of the house is raised but not so high that we couldn't see the dog if we chose to walk up to it and peep inside. My cousin was curious as to where the dog was, but we decided to just walk by. All of a sudden, the dog sprang up, head sticking up and front paws on the wall, and was barking madly at us. I was startled. My cousin got scared out of his wits and turned tail and ran back towards our house as fast as he could. I called out to him to say that everything was alright, that the dog wasn't chasing us or anything. But he ran so fast, and kept running and didn't slow down. And then his shorts began to slip down!!! 

There was a strange moment when my brain was parallelly: assimilating the fact that his shorts were actually slipping down, the mad desire to burst out laughing but also wondering if I should be concerned instead, predicting when he would stop to pull them back up, and calculating whether his underpants would fall off too. His shorts continued to slip. I burst out laughing. He didnt stop to pull them up; even when they were pooled around his ankles he waddled off as fast as he could. Thankfully his underpants didn't fall off.

The expression on my mother's face, when she came to the door, heard me roaring with laughter, saw my cousin pulling up his shorts with me nearly blind with tears of mirth, was priceless.

The 67 thing. Research

Today was supposed to be a holiday as it is Kanakadaasa Jayanthi. While the rest of my classmates (except my project mate Anjali) had two precious days off, tomorrow being a Sunday, I had to go to college to work on my project on graph theory. At first, I felt a little lethargic as I didn't know what we would be discussing about with my guide; I had barely enough time to complete my assignments and the like and reading the paper that I was assigned needed a lot of time at a stretch. It has cases and subcases and subsubcases and few of them aren't even explicitly mentioned.

We started off by clearing Anjali's doubts, which involved line graphs. I was completely disinterested in line graphs. Most of the graph theory that I've learnt in my second semester isn't something that I recall with fondness. While sir had asked me a while back to work on two problems, I hadn't gotten around to even thinking about it as I felt I had to finish reading the paper first to get an idea of what techniques I might have to apply. So after Anjali's doubt was cleared and she was asked to work on a problem, I was asked as to why the proof of a similar theorem fails in my case. I started to think about it. Sir said he would take a walk and get back. Anjali and I were in his cabin, and we decided to go to the first year MSc math class, which had just been cleaned. We then silently began working on our problems independently.

I started to apply the technique of a known theorem about a certain class of graphs to my problem: P3 union K2 free graphs, a super class of the class of graphs already dealt with. I found where the exact same technique would fail and was glad I could now answer sir's question. He still hadn't returned from his walk. I then began to see if I could still obtain an upper bound for the chromatic number of the graphs I was now dealing with in terms of maximum clique size omega. I found that with few minor changes, I could. But this left me with a doubt as I thought he said this problem was not solved. Then how could it have been solved so easily by me?

Sir then came back, and asked me to prove the theorem that we had previously discussed on the board. I did that as neatly and concisely as I could. I drew a vertical line to separate it from my next theorem (this I have picked up from Choudum sir's way of handling the board) and proceeded to prove how I can still apply the same technique to the new problem, with a few minor changes. To my surprise I was able to clear any questions that sir had, and then it seemed that what I had done actually could be right. Sir treated it like as it if was correct and proceeded to ask me the next question: chromatic bound for P5 free graphs in terms of omega. But I said, "So what about the one we proved just now, has it been solved before?". To which he replied, "I do not know if it has been solved, but if it has they might have just let it go as well, without publishing it". I didn't quite know what to make of that, as I was happy I was able to prove something that sir did not know was proved or not; I was happy regardless the fact that it might already be proved as I had done some genuine research now.

Sir then said that the P5 free problem had definitely not been solved, for many years that too, so solving this would be a real contribution to graph theory. He wanted to proceed in the same manner as before, but I spotted that we couldn't do that, as P5 was connected. We still tried going about in a similar manner, trying to partition the vertices in such a way that it was advantageous to us. We reached a certain point and got stuck, and sir pointed out that that was why few people add diamond free graphs as well as that is easier to deal with. We kept thinking about how to solve the problem but we were unable to get past that block. Sir then said that we can think about this later, and said that he had a feeling that it might be possible to solve the problem this way.

All in all, I felt really happy and excited. Doing research is fun! It started off being a little boring today, but it goes to show that if you ask the right questions and persevere, you never know when things can take a turn!

The 66th thing. Google is getting scary

The other day I opened my mail (I don't have to say gmail do I?) on my phone and found two tickets that my uncle had forwarded- my aunt from abroad was coming to visit us. I naturally checked the dates and times of arrival and departure and thought nothing of it. Until the day just before she was about to arrive. I swiped right on my phone from the home screen for Google Now to find me some interesting articles (called cards) to read (this is just based on what I search in Google Chrome so this wasn't anything special). But to my shock, I find details of a flight ticket, neatly telling me to which place the tickets were, the from and to airports, in how much time the departure was, the booking confirmation number, the name of the person in who's name the ticket was booked as well as where this information had come from and who had sent the email.

So Google was checking my mails??? It already registers few key words within the mail so that the advertisements can do their bit but this?? It felt like there was no more privacy anymore (wait, did I even have any privacy to begin with?) and I wondered if I could disable this from happening. But then, I don't have any vital information to hide to be honest, and the Google card had some pretty neat animations (if I looked closely, there was a tiny green plane that would move from one airport to the other, as if tracking the real time movements of the real plane).

I forgot about it after a while, only to find out some new feature of Google's today. I was checking the internet (do I have to say on Google Chrome) and looking for (do I have to say on Google search) for ways to help me write my summer internship report in LaTeX (such a PaIn-In-ThE-aSs) when I found an article that was helpful. I bookmarked it and was about to put it in the LaTeX bookmark folder, but Google beat me to it! It already knew I wanted to put it there and asked me if it should!

Isn't it scary how intelligent Google is getting? Or is already? Now they're testing their self driven cars on actual streets in California.

Pretty soon, if I want to meet my friend for a pizza this is going to happen: Google would read my WhatsApp messages and promptly book an Ola cab, or rather a self driven Google Smart Cab to pick me up. While the cab starts off, it would tell me of the optimum location to meet my friend (based on which Google Smart Cab picked her up) and told me of the best suitable pizzeria to meet (based on my Zomato reviews). It would then start a Google Hangout video chat with my friend so that we could decide on if we really wanted to visit that selected place or try another. Suitable options would pop all over some cool 3D display showing Google Maps while we made a decision. Then the Google Calender would pop up and remind me of an assignment due (I swear this will happen knowing Christ University) and instantly open Google Drive so I can work on the assignment. After I meet my friend and have a great time, its time to get into another Google Smart Cab, which would access any new photos I have on my phone and would ask if I wanted to upload any to Facebook.

All this assuming, of course, that Google has already bought out Whatsapp, Ola, Zomato and Facebook.