Who's going to MathCamp 09?

SimonM

So, who's going to MathCamp 2009?

Me, for one

Actually, I should probably ask people to write something about their selves, but since is the first thing I've done of this kind (- you Britain), I have no idea what to suggest. Any suggestions?

Which grade are you in?

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mathemonster

what grade are you in?

**Posted:** Sun May 03, 2009 7:08 am

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$\mathbb{PR}\phi\mathbb{MY}\int$ '09
Current Results/Goals: NEML 12/12, RIML 18/18, USAMTS R2 ?/25

SimonM

Year 13, Upper VIth, 12th Grade

**Posted:** Sun May 03, 2009 7:31 am

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bananalin · New Member Offline Joined: 01 May 2009 Posts: 5

People have already received their decisions?!?! O.o
my anxiety level just got tripled

**Posted:** Sun May 03, 2009 2:57 pm

Smartguy

i dont think so, i haven't gotten anything yet

**Posted:** Sun May 03, 2009 5:02 pm

shelly32494

neither have i.

i think some ppl who sent their apps in early have gotten theirs back.

**Posted:** Sun May 03, 2009 5:51 pm

SimonM

I think they aim to have them done by the 15th or so. I got mine back particularly early for some reason

**Posted:** Sun May 03, 2009 11:28 pm

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bananalin · New Member Offline Joined: 01 May 2009 Posts: 5

Hopefully, they won't be dragged out until the 15th. The suspense is quite unnerving XP

**Posted:** Mon May 04, 2009 12:38 am

LadyKn1ght

If it's like previous years, they will probably send out most decisions by the end of this week. However, this is just a guess, and it would likely depend how many applications they received and such. I believe I got my acceptance about a week and a half after the deadline...I don't think they'll drag it out till the 15th.

**Posted:** Mon May 04, 2009 4:57 am

LadyKn1ght

Oh, and I should post an introduction, since I'm going. Heh, I'm totally copying and pasting this from last year. Again. Although I edited more this time. But, anyway, that's why I have a lot more than my grade here Razz

.

I'm Laura Zehender, from near Richmond, VA (I have lived here my whole life). I am 17 and will be a senior next year (eeek, I'm old maybe

), and have been homeschooled since 2nd grade. This will be my third year at Mathcamp Mr. Green

(went in '07 and '08), and I went to MathPath in '06. Randomly, I own eight camp t-shirts. My interests/activities include....
Math (duh): especially combinatorics, geometry, and knot theory, thanks to camp last year Smile

.
Dance: for regular dancing, ballet and tap now, jazz and pointe previously--I've danced for 13 years now. Last summer at MC, I got into partner dancing, thanks to all of the awesome people there who taught us/brought us to local dances. I can remember a decent amount of contra and swing, and a little of waltz and salsa. I hope there's a lot of partner dancing again, it's awesome.
Classics: Latin (which I've done for way too long), Mythology (mainly Greek), and Ancient history in general.
Music: I play piano well enough, although I'm horrible in comparison to people at Mathcamp (I can't wait to hear all of the amazing musicians at MC again Laugh

.) I especially like playing Tchaikovsky music (if you see a book of Tchaikovsky music lying around camp, that'd probably be mine.) I mainly listen to country, although I don't object to listening to almost any kind of music. I've heard lots of genres in dance classes over the years.
Shooting: Rifle and bow shooting are my favorites, although I also do shotgun (and only at targets...yeah.) I've been in a 4-H shooting club for two years now, and I placed 4th in rifle at the 4-H state meet last fall Smile

. Oh, and I also enjoy shooting with a camera (and in this case, I do shoot people Wink

.) Prepare for a ridiculous amount of photos on Facebook after camp...
Arts&Crafts: I waste way too much time on these. I like modeling clay (especially to make miniatures, which I sorta collect), pencil or pen drawing (also, prepare for some of those many photos turning up as drawings on Facebook later), beading, making (sometimes mathematical) jewelry, photography and photo editing, embroidery, and knitting (I learned how to knit a mobius strip at MC '08; it's pretty fun.) And now painting with acrylics.
Cubing: Although I'm not very good at it, it's fun, and I know too many people (from Mathcamp) who are really into it for some interest in it to not have rubbed off on me..

I also am a bookworm (I read mostly fantasy, but often science fiction and historical fiction, too, and random other books. And classics. As in, really old classics from ancient history [like, Plato's Dialogues, the Odyssey...]) Um, let me stop before I list books I like, because that could get out of hand Wink

. To cover a couple topics that came up in the previous introduction threads, I'm a Libertarian, an ENFJ (Myers-Briggs type). And I'm a chocoholic--although just dark chocolate. Like, really dark chocolate Mr. Green

.

Oh, and I also am excited to hopefully try some more random board games at Mathcamp; there are always tons of obscure but fun ones there. Just don't try to make me join a Mao game. People have tried Rolling Eyes

.

This year I've gone to PUMaC, HMMT, and Duke math meets, and I'm going to ARML (anyone else going to Penn State?) This is only my second year of going to math meets, and they're super fun. This year I went to everything on the Chesapeake team (with which I'm going to ARML again...yay for there finally being a team to cover non-TJ Virginia Very Happy

), except for Duke. I sneaked on the GA team for Duke math meet for the second time, despite not being from GA....

**Posted:** Mon May 04, 2009 12:08 pm

Darmani · Poincare Conjecture Offline Joined: 04 Apr 2008 Posts: 126

Technically my name is James Koppel, but Mathcamp last year made me accept that I will probably always be "Jimmy." I'm a 17 year-old senior from St. Louis, MO. Next year I'll be going to Carnegie-Mellon, unless I get off the MIT waitlist.

Even more so than math, I am extremely interested in computer science, especially in programming languages (if you're curious what a context-free language with Hindley-Milner type inference which supports anonymous functions but not first class functions would look like and want a BNF syntax for one, ask me). My favorites are Ruby and Lisp (currently trying to learn Clojure), but I have done medium to large projects in about a half dozen others. I am a huge fan of Paul Graham, and a member of news.ycombinator.com.

In math, I have grown enamored of number theory. I know little about topology, but it sounds really cool, and I am quite keen on studying it. And, of course, I like theoretical computer science. I'm currently trying to self-study the lambda calculus, and hope to teach a class on it during Week 5.

Now, to try to think of my interests that aren't primarily math or CS...

Music: I will try to evangelize my new favorite, E.S. Posthumus. That probably won't be too hard, considering how surprised I was to find that Mathcampers mostly like the same kind of music I do (classical music, video game themes, and Broadway themes were all I heard for most of camp).

Chess: I have a decent collection of trophies, but I suck by Mathcamp standards (my rating's been hovering around 1100).

Languages: I love German.

Books: I've only recently (6 months ago) gotten back into a constant reading habit. Since then, I've read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and am currently reading a mix of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

Politics: If you didn't already guess from the dose of Rand, I am an ardent libertarian (Ron Paul 2012!). I didn't know Billy was libertarian until he mentioned it in the yearbook, and I didn't know Laura was until just now, so it seems we have to shout that out a bit more.

Martial Arts: I've been doing classical fencing casually for 6 years, and will have a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do by the time camp starts.

Video games: I'll play a good game from any genre, but I'm mainly interested in TBSs. I'm a huge fan of the Heroes of Might and Magic series, but I also like 4X games. I also like RTSs and RPGs a lot. (I'm currently playing the original Baldur's Gate.)

**Posted:** Mon May 04, 2009 5:44 pm

solafidefarms

* also copies-and-pastes-and-modifies *

Hi, I'm Billy, homeschooled soon-to-be-not-senior-anymore (MIT next year!), and my favorite word is 'poecilonym'. I do absolutely love COUNTRY MUSIC! and singers thereof (particularly Sara and Brad and Danielle and Martina and Eric, in no order). I'd like to imagine I can carry on an intelligent although divagating conversation about politics, religion, philosophy, history, vocabulary, farming, &c. I've been to HMMT and Pumac x2 and DMM x4 and ARML x4. I also organized the first and so far only homeschool-run math meet in GA as a junior.

Oh yes, I do math, and computer science, and sesquipedaliophilia; I dabble in biology and history. (I also talk archaicly when I am either uncomfortable with what I'm saying or am trying to be humorous) I've done work both in encryption and in simulation, I'm also a fan of programming languages and have studied lambda calculus some amount, to reply to Jimmy. I shotgun, I enjoy Attack! (risk++), hearts, stratego, fluxx, mao, mao, mao, and I run slowly. I've never solved a cube. And I'm sure I forgot at least something else about me. Oh yes, I enjoy country music greatly. Smile

Politics and religion: It is not actually true that all returning Mathcampers are libertarian. It is actually true that I can only think of one other returning camper (and two not-returning campers) who are also libertarian. I will say, though, that libertarianness must be modified by religion: I'm a Christian. Joel Salatin, who appeared on the front of USA Today for Earth Day 2009, has said he is a Christian libertarian environmentalist farmer. I really look up to Mr. Salatin, and so will happily also claim this. Though I haven't sold at a farmer's market in some years now.

Reading: Just finished Watership Down after the two days of the USAMO. Bunnies are aliens. Reading Hitchhiker's Guide when it's juxtaposed with me and I have time. Just discovered the joys of Coleridge. Have read the Complete Works of O. Henry in the last year. Love love love Pascal, the KJV Bible, the Silmarillion and to a lesser extent Lord of the Rings. Enjoy the magazines First Things, Reason, and old Mother Earth News (new ones are all citified). Get my news from a combination of those magazines, the Green Left Weekly, Dr. Laura's blog, news.ycombinator.com, Phoronix, and Schneier's blog. I'm not especially well-versed in US news since the last election: I can't tell you what I think of Obama's presidency. But I can tell you that right before MIT CPW I went to a Tax Day Tea Party and walked the 3 miles back to MIT holding up my "Free Markets not Free Loaders" sign.

I'll be a two-time camper after this summer - I'm semi-fluent in Food Tongue and hope I meet more awesome people and do less stupid things this summer than last. (Apple cauliflower Sweet Tea.) (Sweet Tea would be an interest of mine that I didn't mention Razz

. Sweet tea! Yee-haw!)

(Based on the current flu situation, I move that we stick to only verbalized nosebops, without physical nosebops. * nosebop * )

**Posted:** Mon May 04, 2009 8:08 pm

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Darmani · Poincare Conjecture Offline Joined: 04 Apr 2008 Posts: 126

By the way:

Theorem: Mao is the most fun game
Proof: Suppose there were a game G that was more fun than Mao. You could then institute a rule in Mao that called for playing G as one of its effects. Then Mao would be at least as fun as G (likely more fun, since the rule could call for interactions between the "embedded" game G and the host game of Mao). Contradiction!

LadyKn1ght

**Posted:** Wed May 06, 2009 5:07 am

e=mc2.kroll · P versus NP Offline Joined: 19 Sep 2008 Posts: 32

**Posted:** Wed May 06, 2009 8:13 am

SimonM

Wow, I suddenly feel excessively lazy for not writing nearly as much as you guys...

**Posted:** Wed May 06, 2009 8:19 am

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Darmani · Poincare Conjecture Offline Joined: 04 Apr 2008 Posts: 126

Mao is similar to Uno or Crazy Eights, except that you don't know the rules, and the point of the game is to figure them out. When you go out of cards, you can make a new rule for others to figure out.

And e=mc2.kroll's objection is flawed, for Mao is not boring. Though, even if it was, the rule could call for playing G for an indefinitely long period of time, meaning, the fun-value of that game of Mao would be a negative fun value for a period of time whose expected value is finite followed by the fun of G for an infinite period of time, meaning that, worst case, the fun of Mao would be asymptotically just as fun as the most fun game.

And did I seriously write "Suppose there was a game G that was more fun that G?" Ack, edit time -- I meant "more fun than Mao."

**Posted:** Wed May 06, 2009 8:37 am

Zeph · Hodge Conjecture Offline Joined: 29 Jul 2008 Posts: 77

Hmmm... well, I haven't received word (SLOOOOOOWPOKE, yes, but I didn't have internet for the past week or so!), and after hearing how many people solved more problems than I did on the Qualifying Quiz, I'm feeling even more (!) anxious about my application... hopefully news arrives soon. But really, the reason I decided to make a post was to comment on how awesome LadyKn1ght's initials are. Unrelatedly, my name is Leon Zhang. Mr. Green

**Posted:** Wed May 06, 2009 12:42 pm

LadyKn1ght

Haha, nice. Last year there were two others with initials "LZ"...a Leo and a Leon, actually. Wow, this might get confuddling if they both go back and you go maybe

...

**Posted:** Wed May 06, 2009 12:49 pm

Darmani · Poincare Conjecture Offline Joined: 04 Apr 2008 Posts: 126

Lol, I wish it was only that confusing. In fact, we had a Leo Zhou, a Leon Zhou....and a Leonid. Oh, and I suppose we had Leonhard Euler with us in spirit.

**Posted:** Wed May 06, 2009 2:13 pm