Martin Geisler Online

I’ve just come home from the first Summer Bar here at Skejbygård… It started with me playing dart with Svend for over an hour: it takes an incredible amount of tries to hit all twenty targets in the correct order, hitting the little ring around bulls eye, and then finishing off by hitting bulls eye itself :-) I joked that it ought to take me about 400 throws to hit the twenty targets, because I had a 1/20 chance of hitting the right target in each throw. In the end we decided that it was a draw, although Svend was leading in most of the game.

After that I played with Jesper who lives at the same hall as me. He managed to beat me, but just barely! :-) A little later I played even more dart, this time with Christina who also live right next door to me. Christina has just moved in, but that didn’t keep her from beating me soundly: I had only managed to hit the targets from 20 down to 12 when she finished off with a perfect hit at the bulls eye! Amazing!

With all that playing dart, I cannot understand if I’m not getting better… I guess time will tell. I’ll go to bed now so that I can be ready for the final match in the World Cup. Good night!

No more exams! I had my last exam last Tuesday: Calculus. It went fantastic — I got the grade 13 which is the top grade in the Danish school-system!

The exam was an aural exam with 30 minutes preparation. I was so lucky that I got “The Complex Exponential Function” as my question. That was probably the easiest question among the 15 that I had to choose from. The other questions were about things like the length of a curve in Rⁿ, Fourier Series and so on — much harder questions. I don’t think I would have gotten a 13 if I had gotten one of the other questions… perhaps 10 or 11 instead (there’s no 12 in the Danish grade system).

But that doesn’t matter: I got the question and after waiting 30 minutes I told them everything they wanted to know about it. They then asked me some questions about other things, such a Fourier Series. That also went well — It’s not that I bad at handling Fourier Series, it’s just that most proofs are terribly long and boring. In the end the censor got curious: he wanted to know if the Exponential Function had an inverse function, e.g. he wanted me to talk about the complex logarithm. We haven’t seen this in our books, but I did manage to find some of the formula for z given w = e^z:

The formula is found by taking advantage of, that |e^z| = |w| and arg(e^z) = arg(w). Here we have that |e^z| = e^x and that arg(e^z) = y and the result follows easily from that.

I’ve just received a preliminary score for my written test in Calculus — I got 92 points out of 100. This is just a quick count done by my lecturer, the censors have yet to see it, so the score might shift a little. I’ll know my final score after my aural test this Tuesday — that’s just five days away! But so far it looks good :-)

I’ve been rehearsing with Jérémy since the written test six days ago — we’ve been training from 14:00 to ~19:00 each day. There’s 31 questions and only 10 days to train, so it’s been a busy week. But we’re getting there, we now have four days to discuss the last 12 subjects.

Yes!! Today I had my last written exam in this round. That means that I’ve had three of my four exams — the last one is aural Calculus (mathematical analysis).

Todays test was written Calculus. I believe it went pretty well — I answered all the questions, and with the help of my TI89 graphics calculator I was able to check most of my answers. It’s a fantastic help to have a calculator that can do symbolic manipulation — many of the calculations were quite long and boring, and the risk of making a little mistake was high. I cought myself saying “2 × 3 = 5″…

I now have about ten days to prepare for the next and final exam. I have to make an outline for 31 subjects in those ten days, so there’ll be plenty to do. But we get 30 minutes to prepare ourselves at the exam, so I don’t think it’ll be that bad — or perhaps I’m just being optimistic :-)