sevenfactorial

[sevenfactorial]

being in academia is kind of like where you're on everest and you see the frozen bodies of the other people who've tried it strewn about everywhere and you think "okay, but that's them and i'm me"

[sevenfactorial]

[sevenfactorial]

Spend more time formatting your LaTeX to look pretty than actually proving anything.

[sevenfactorial]

the color signatures of various elements when ignited

FB image credit: Ceres Science

[sevenfactorial]

I understand why a period is more proper (and think that period touching the eq is better than being there but not touching), but I'm not sure if I just didn't notice them back when I was learning tex (many years ago, in undergrad) or if some of my profs at the time didn't use them either or what. At any rate, it's not a habit for me to include them at this point. (I don't really want to dig to find old assignments to check. I certainly have some somewhere, but they might only be accessible via laptop which is in my office atm.)

okay for latex typesetting my advisor prefers putting a period at the end of an equation in big math mode if it forms the end of a sentence. i prefer just leaving out punctuation and hoping people figure it out from context. i understand that his method makes more "sense" on some formal level but it feels wrong to me to put a period in big math mode! thats not what big math mode is for! i made some examples

feel free to be loosy goosy about whether you count as a mathematician. if you use latex a lot that counts

[sevenfactorial]

I am forever grateful to an archivist mentor I worked with in grad school for some resume advice she gave me and thought maybe others would also benefit from it.

Keep a Master Resume.

This is not the resume you send out. This is a detailed resume of every job (with dates and location, supervisor and location phone number are a bonus) and as many skills/duties/accomplishments you can possibly think of for each and every one of the jobs and education programs you can think of.

She showed me hers, it was about 25 pages long, and formatted exactly like a regular resume for ease. Every time she would learn a new program/skill, she'd add it. Change in title or duties, add it. Complete something big/special/complicated/new to her/professionally significant, she would add it. This way when she went up for a promotion or raise, she had a detailed record of highlights to pick from to show she deserved it. There was no "when was that? Did I submit that last round of reviews?"

Applying to a new job? Pick and choose items from your Master Resume to plug in to the resume or CV you will be sending based on the job posting. You don't need to rewrite it, just cut and paste relevant details.

[sevenfactorial]

And then the professor demonstrated the Wiener-Kolmogorov helicopter.

Check out the bonus panel on the site!

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print!

[sevenfactorial]

Math is really tiring, im so glad i finally get to relax and do some knitting and crochet and i oh god oh my what the fuck

[sevenfactorial]

you know, it's real interesting that normal vectors are always perpendicular to whatever they're normal to. Like, no matter what you are, "normal" is always going away from you in a direction you don't care about or can't comprehend

[sevenfactorial]

A good friend of my spouse's and mine made us an amazing alphabet book for our baby! Entirely written and illustrated by hand. Look how gorgeous:

(not including all of them because I didn't want to overwhelm with images, but here are A, B, C, and a selection of my favourites. I particularly love J!)

Also here's the title page!

I love this book so much I wanted to share it with my friends on here. Baby is still too little for books, but I'm sure he'll love it too!!

[sevenfactorial]

Decide to give up on the problem only to come back to it five minutes later.

[sevenfactorial]

server towers at the internet archive, each blue light signifies an article being accessed or edited (in real time!)

[sevenfactorial]

t-shirt that says "biggest slut at the competition math exam"

[sevenfactorial]

I love that so very much of mathematics can be described as upgrading linear algebra in various ways.

[sevenfactorial]

Math is so cool, I wish numbers were real.

[sevenfactorial]

while i’m on a little STEM sharing kick, here’s one of my favorite textbook intros of all time