Sunday, March 29, 2009

Lunch: Halal 786 Restaurant


We went out to try one of the famous Pakistani dishes at Montreal. The restaurant is situated near to Parc metro, Jean-Talon west.

Friends from McGill.

yummy...mutton curry

nice try out. Butter chicken

Pakistani "ayam golek"...

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Journey towards PhD

From "A PhD Thesis Without Tears", John Creedy, 2007 (research paper)

During your preliminary reading, ...in describing what you want to investigate, you should be able to frame a clear question. One should prepare to answer questions like

  1. 1. What was the question motivating this paper?

    2. What are the author’s major results?

    3. What do you regard as the main limitations of the approach?

    4. In what ways do you expect your research to extend existing literature?

Note: a very useful standard materials

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Brush Everything Up!

This week, I've came up with three questions and one basic concept to be discussed with my advisor. I always try to think of, what is really there in a mind of a professor. It was very synonym that whatever kind of question that came up, these people usually have something to say about it and they explain it very well. Same happen to my advisor. He always have answer to all my question. And the best it, it is instantly giving question to an instantly giving answer. How do you feel about that?

There's a time, when he cannot think of a good way to answer, but he thought of it real deep, and the process was continuous. At the end, he will finally get to show ideas to solving such problems. Like what happened this week. He took more time to work out the solution for an if and only if statement prove. He wrote everything on the board and I try to get the idea of the solving method. When we sit down, just when I tried to wrote everything down in my notes, he said,

"so, that's pretty all of it. Afterward please brush everything up."

I looked at his face and not sure what kind of 'face' that I showed him, but he replied with

"no, no, I don't ask you to clean up the board, just detail everything up for that solution OK...", he laugh.

Owh, it's pretty obvious huh!!! @#$$$#&#&@@

Friday, March 06, 2009

Department Research Seminar


his is the continuing of department pizza seminar with a new name called department research seminar. It's a less catchy than the previous name. But the way the seminar was organized will be the same. Towards the end of the seminar, pizza will be served.

In this seminar the talk was given by my Lie Group teacher. The title was Introduction to Tau-Function. The outline were examples of Tau-Function and also the application one can have of the function due to physics interest. So, I must say most of the crowd is a very familiar faces with a mathematical physics background. The speaker used a slide presentation with a total of 37 slides and a given one hour timing. But there were not enough time and the rest 10 slides were sacrificed.

However, the contents are quite interesting to me. The famous example of the Tau-Function would be the Schur function, solitons, tau-function that is associated to algebraic curve and random processes. The common application that physicist can benefits from the Tau-Function would be on the fermionic Fock space. This is something that a particle physicist would deal with. Which I may never tried to go into deep.

The beauty of the examples of the Tau-Function is that they have a determinant properties and there's two more which I forget to write it down during the seminar. hehehe.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

zzz...



What can I say. I felt so sleepy during the Lie group class this week. I know that I have work late the night before the class and my eyes are so tired. I try my very best to not show the obvious sleepy look on my face. To make it worse, the topic of this week is proving some theorem and the teacher had successfully jumble out an unorganized notations. He used to talk ahead further than what he was writing at the board.

Which make myself struggled to take notes. This course has definitely give me a headache. As my friend was saying, "there's no headache in consequence learning group theory..."

Talk Like A Physicist

I just found this interesting site from my Google alert for quantum mechanics. Who found that this cartoon hilarious.

Many World Quantum Interpretation-Talk Like A Physicist


credits to TalkLikeAPhysicists.com

Monday, March 02, 2009

Finally... A Real Task

As usual I have a weekly discussion with my supervisor for the subject on the group theory, topics on Hilbert space and Lebesgue measure. Those three topics are the ultimate goal for the rest of 24/7 days of my life so far. However, for this week, after preparing myself for whole week on my presentation, I didn't managed to present a thing. Since my supervisor has taken the whole time to explain me the general idea of the matter discussed. And I found myself happy with it. I must say that this is the shortest discussion that I've ever had.

Before we end, I suggest few things on my preparation for the comprehensive exam plus continuing on the problems for modern analysis and group theory. He mentioned that in the mean time, he will hand over some journals and group theory problem for me to work on with because later on I may end up working on such problems. Better start now or then.

So I guest this is the beginning of my research work. It doesn't have to wait until I finished all my courses though. But first thing first, I need to pass the comprehensive test. Good luck.