Spent most of the day at PUMaC, the Princeton University Math Competition (you can't pronounce "PUMC" after all).

Man those tests were hard. And I mean hard. Hard as in, "How the heck do I even start this problem?" hard.

It's not even obscure topics so to speak, except for maybe the number theory stuff. The four categories for individual tests were algebra, geometry, number theory, and combinatorics; each person on the team took two. I took algebra and geometry, in hindsight perhaps I should have took number theory instead of algebra. Oh well.

Algebra sounds easy, doesn't it? 4x+1=5, solve for x, right? Wrong. Out of ten questions, I only came up with confident answers for 3 of them.

You've got stuff like writing the closed form of a summation of a summation. Dealing with logs (which actually wasn't bad at all, it was one of the questions I got). Don't remember many of the algebra questions since so many of them were so hard I didn't even start to attempt them.

Geometry I remember more of, since I did better on that, more on that later. Yay spatial thinking and trigonometry! Oh yeah, no calculators, by the way, just thought I'd make that clear. There was an XKCD reference on one of the geometry questions, actually. About Randall Munroe at the center of a pentagon with velociraptors at each vertex. There was also a question that asked for the cosine of a solid angle. Waaaaaat.

I actually did pretty darned good on the geometry test... enough, at least, that when combined with the algebra test I qualified for the individual finals. Which consisted of 3 proofs. I only got the second one. The first one seemed to contradict itself as soon as you plugged in 1 for n (and it said for n is equal to all positive integers, no other conditions on n) and the third one was obscure graph theory which I didn't grasp at all despite having taken a graph theory course (hypergraphs? What? Is that like super mode or something? And it's not like I remember any of the coloring proofs...).

Anyway, while we were off taking the individual finals the Math Bowl took place! My teacher said it's just to keep the rest of the kids occupied while their teammates take said finals. Math Bowl is sort of this Jeopardy-type thing where they ask questions on mental math, mathematicians, trivia on Princeton University (*cough*ego*cough*), and random. It's the random one I want to mention. The finals finished in time for us all to watch the final round of the Math Bowl in the lecture hall, so everyone was there watching, including the rest of our team because they'd failed (FAIL).

Anyway I was only half paying attention, with a headphone in one ear, when I heard, "Question [whatever number it was]: Random. In this anime adaptation--" and I'm like "Huh, what?" Nearly laughed out loud when I heard the rest of the question. Didn't catch all of it, but it was something like, "... this character, played by Aya Hirano and Wendee Lee in the dub..." at this point, thought to myself, well that's narrowed it down to only two options, "... appears to be a normal schoolgirl, but unbeknownst to even herself--" "Suzumiya Haruhi!" Aaand I think the proctor heard me because the room was pretty quiet, and afterwards he reminded the audience not to say the answers. Neither of the teams got it, anyway. <<;; But anyway that was pretty unexpected.

Anyway (third paragraph that starts with anyway) at the awards ceremony it turns out that I got 4th place in division B for the geometry test! Got a pretty trophy for it. I is happy. =D

Got no chapter of 52-pickup to hype today. Updates will be Sundays from now on, since my Saturdays are shot.

Anyway, that was my day.