nawl

Complex analysis. The homework this semester has been trivial. I think my standards have changed, that I've become more arrogant.

Last semester's homework in real analysis was always an epic battle. Me vs. Rudin, late into the night on a Tuesday. I struggled, I cried, and when suddenly the light flickered on and revealed the beautiful three-line answer that had been before me the whole time, I laughed. Then it was time to wipe the sweat from my eyes and move to the next problem. In the end, I emerged victorious, having vanquished a small part of my stupidity. It helped that the midterm and final were easy.

This semester, we, um, plug things into definitions and the answers fall out.

The professor gives killer quizzes, though. Last week he told us four out of twenty-eight passed. He spent a good twenty minutes yelling at us for having uniformly chosen the wrong way to do one of the problems. He's a big guy, eastern european accent. "This is trivial multi-variable calculus!" I think an earlier version of me would have been afraid, but now I can't help but be amused that I've chosen to take this class and be yelled at (in the eastern european accent), for failing to live up to expectations. Some days he comes in and attacks the board, methodically laying out axioms and propositions for an hour and a half, no break in the middle, at a pace that leaves me breathless. And I'm a fast writer. Sometimes he takes things at a more leisurely pace. After finishing a proof, he'll say, "You understand? No? I repeat." It's a different culture, man.

After class, I went up to him and asked if perhaps he could assign us harder homework problems, more along the level of difficulty of his quizzes. His quizzes aren't necessarily very difficult, but I'm out of practice in my stupid calculus tricks, and the book isn't giving me the review I need. He said, "You want harder problems? I give you harder problems. Come to my office." I did, and on the way up he told me that I should take the Putnam, and that when he was in Romania he had 9/12 on the Putnam, and would have been in the top five if he had been in the US.

Once in his office, he pulled a book from his bookshelf and turned to me. "Do you speak French?" "Uh, yeah." He gave me a battered book entitled Recueil des problemes sur la theorie des fonctions analytiques (traduit du Russe). On my way out of the office, I offered it to the other students who had come to office hours. They held their hands up and shook their heads.