PTSD

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Twice today I've gotten the same argument: Grad school is for professional socialization. Here (via Crooked Timber) and from a discussion with Weberman this afternoon.

While I'm glad he took the time to talk to me about the comp from hell, it's a little depressing that I still need this stuff explained to me. Okay, a lot depressing. At this point, I'm operating on pure spite and a streak of stubborn a mile wide. The idea that something titled a comprehensive exam turns out to be anything but is frustrating and doesn't bode well for the rest of my academic career.

That I couldn't remember the name of the reader from the last exam doesn't bode well for my ability to pass the next one. My inability to recall names is universal and chronic, so at least I consistently look addled. It isn't as if I have a mental block just for the neorealists. (Yes, Waltz. Even I remember Waltz. But there were others, so he only gets me so far.)

A lot of boding today, and none of it good.

I've pretty much given up studying at this point. The consensus seems to be that I know what I'm talking about (I'm not a part of the consensus, but hey, who am I to argue?) and if I could just figure out the structure and those pesky names and titles, I'd be fine. Whew. And here I thought it was going to be something I've had trouble with.

Instead of cramming for the exam, a method that hasn't done me any good in the previous 23 years of schooling (I figured it out last week. I'm in the 24th grade), I'm reading a funny, funny book about calculus.

For instance:

That square root of 2 is like the Yeti or the Loch Ness monster, the snows of yesteryear, the dusky ghost by the dusty window--it is not there, it cannot be found, it is not part of the furniture of this or any other world....Whatever incommensurable magnitudes might be, they treated such things as if they were really numbers--irrational numbers, the irrational a nice inadvertant touch signifying the madness loitering around the very notion--and learned many tricks by which such numbers might be manipulated. In the twelfth century, for example, Bhaskara demonstrated correctly that [3^1/2 + 12^1/2 = 3*3^1/2], an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University. (It is pleasant to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)

It looks a lot better with the actual square root symbols, and if I could figure out how to code them, I would. But you get the idea. If mathematicians don't always take themselves seriously, why in the world should we?

posted by Elizabeth @ 6:24 PM