Time for a poll

[chickenfeet]

I needed an excuse to use the user pic voted most popular by a random sample of sentient beings. I've also had some interesting on and off line convos and comments about math(s) recently so I thought what we really need is more ticky boxes. Lo, I bring you the great math(s) poll!

[Poll #826509]

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

What about 'I married a mathematician so am not allowed to ignore it whether I'd like to or not'?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure which is weirder; a mathematician or someone who would marry one.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Ah, there may have been false pretences involved. I thought he was a CompSci, because of his D.Phil. The BA in Mathematics only sneaked into conversation later. ;-)

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

We often sneak that onto people. It's part of our charm.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Strangeness and charm, even. :)

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

*chuckles*, though admits he knows not a thing about physics, due to being the son of a physicist.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Does that make you completely spinorless?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

To the point where I had to look up that word.

(I only ever took one course on rings/groups/fields, and never anything past the typical MIT mechanics and E+M courses that everyone has to take. I even took them in the more experiment-oriented flavour, because that was when I hoped that my undergrad education could teach me to like engineering. That failed.)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Spinor theory is somewhat off the mainstream of current mathematical research but I thought you might just have come across it as it's the field that Andrew Hodges works in.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Nope. After I read his book on Turing, I did spend some time looking at his website, but quickly realized that I was hurting as when I once tried to understand tensors. There really does seem to be a physics way of talking about math and a CS way of talking about math, and despite their both being really algebraic, I can't understand the physics one at all. And physicists who write in our journals drive me crazy.