Red Carnation! (Warning: May contain maths...)

For those of you who don't know Oxford traditions - you wear a carnation for all your exams. Your first exam of your exam period you wear a white carnation, then after that a pink carnation and for your final exam you wear a red carnation meaning...

...They're all over!

The reddening of the carnation is meant to symbolise you bleeding and hence sacrificing yourself for your exams (which seems a little gory and over the top to me) but as of 4pm on Monday I have been a free man with no more Oxford Exams! The exams were stressful (as ever) but I feel they went better than I thought they would.

WARNING: The following 3 paragraphs may contain Maths! You have been warned...

First up was Graph Theory - last Friday morning, 1.5hrs. This went quite well (I think!) and I answered 2 questions (as I needed to) fully and am quite confident in my answers. First was about Hall's Marriage Theorem (as always) but with some weird applications to perfect matchings of regular bipartite graphs. The second was chromatic polynomials and pretty straightforward. Even the last part was pretty easy so I just hope I haven't missed the point!

Next was Lie Algebras & Representation Theory of Symmetric Groups - Monday morning, 3hrs. This was definitely the exam I was most worried about (I was very nearly sick on Monday morning beforehand) and I felt that this was a particularly hard paper (as all the other people taking the exam seemed to agree), however I answered 4 questions (2 from each section as required) and was quite happy with what I put down. I think that even though I 'hand-waved' some bits I still put down reasonably sensible answers. The two questions on Lie Algebras were weird (one involved weird direct sums of perp spaces with respect to the killung form, and the other involved the Cartan Matrix and calculating valid roots) and I think some of my bookwork may have been off but I got two reasonable answers at the end of it. The representation theory was, if possible, even weirder. The first went well (it involved a combination of the Hook Formula, Murnaghan-Nakayama and weird properties of tableaux) and the second I was pretty pleased with too (it involed Specht Modules, the Submodule Theorem and D-lambda modules). The last part involved Gram Matrices which the lecturer had briefly mentioned in the last lecture of the course. She had also said in passing that the rank of the Gram Matrix was the dimension of D-lambda whcih I somehow managed to remember in the exam so I was pretty pleased. Especially as I don't think anyone else remembered it.

Finally I had Axiomatic Set Theory - Monday afternoon, 1.5hrs. This went fine as well I think - I answered all three questions so hopefully at least one will be decent! The first was about the V-alpha hierarchy with a bit of a tricky question about the validity of certain axioms in V-lambda for lambda a limit ordinal. The second was cardinal arithmetic - the König inequality, the generalized continuum hypothesis and some exponentiation problems. I couldn't do the problems but did the bookwork fine. Finally, the last was about absoluteness and upwards-absoluteness. I hadn't practiced this much but reckon I did a decent job - answering all parts with at least a small degree of confidence.

END OF WARNING: No more maths from now on! (Or at least none explicitly...)

So overall I think my exams went well - I'm quietly confident I got a 2:i (what I need for Fulbright) and hopefully may have retained my first but you never know with Oxford exams (and I still don't know about my dissertation).

Since then I haven't been up to much other than sleeping, enjoying doing nothing and doing a load of admin for Fulbright. Nearly set up my Citibank account now and found out I have yet another Orientation to attend (that's four so far!). Ever since finishing I've suddenly become a lot more excited/nervous about America - all of a sudden it's very real...

In other news, I ordered some Rutgers Stash for my party today. Everyone is going to quite a bit of effort for the fancy dress - so far Tom is thinking of coming as Captain America, Steph & Lucy as cheerleaders or cowgirls, Jo has an idea but is keeping it secret and Nicole has bought a Scarlett O'Hara style Southern Belle dress.

And so that's about it. I haven;t got much planned for the next few days (other than finally getting to some KEEN sessions this term) but I think the next two weeks are going to be emotional. I found the boat club cruise pretty tough a couple of weeks ago - it was such an end of an era - and I've already felt myself welling up a couple of times - like last night in the music room realising that we would only have a couple more singing sessions ever...

Anyways, enough about me getting sentimental - I've just got to twiddle my thumbs until Monday 29th June when I get my results! Argh!

Later Days

David