Prof. Lazebnik's talk:
I thought it was really interesting how he was able to remember certain problems after so many years. I was also amazed on how these problems influenced him so much.
I did have a teacher that first influenced me towards math when I was younger. I was always good at math in elementary school and I was always in the advanced classes except after 5th grade because the teacher felt I was too quiet which was fine. I really didn't notice until the 7th grade when I had the teacher that no one ever wanted for math. My teacher, Mr. Scheffler, was known to be very strict. One day he had called on me for a problem. It was something really easy like conversions or something but I asked to do it on the board which I guess was the first time that happened because after that he was just always very nice, and he liked to show me as an example for other kids of what they should have been doing on their hw and such. I did practically perfect on all the hws and exams. He liked to talk about how I should seriously consider math and how I should start early so that summer he gave me a lot of work to do. It might have been the work just covered by the advanced class but I did it all and the following year skipped to the advanced classes and so I continued with those until college. From there it was just always math. I went to math camps and did some math competitions and just always enjoyed it.
Another really cool teacher I had was my calculus teacher in high school. He was a really akward guy but he had the craziest stories. Also if you dropped some coins, any coins, on the ground, he would be able to guess which coins fell and how many of each coin. He also had a quotient rule song which might have influenced me to memorize it for the rest of my life.
Other than that, these professors named Pelesko and Cook introduced me to research and I really liked that! It kindof might have influenced me to decide what I want to do with the rest of my life but who knows. :)
And I do love math too. I'm not always the best at it but I appreciate it and I honestly think its the best thing in the world to finally figure out a problem and completely understand it.
1 comment:
That coin thing is cool! How did he do that?
Congrats on the SES award. Looking forward to working with you again. At some point we should talk more about what to do this summer. Research is funny, lot's of time you start something & it fails miserably. So, you try something else. Usually with students I'm able to pick a problem that I know will lead to at least some success. I kind of feel like we haven't yet found the right problem for you yet. What do you think?
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