Nick Davila > Recent Status Updates

God idk why I force myself to read pre-faces

I’m so stereotypical sometimes 😂😂 reading this makes me laugh cuz I know y’all are like “of course he’d read something like that” but I’m just not judging a book by its cover!!

“It is beautiful to take leave of things. It puts you in a gentle frame of mind. I felt a fondness for the hard chair I was sitting on and for my rustic tumbler, a fondness for the cool, fruity taste of the wine from Alsace, a fondness for each and everyone known to me in that room, for the faces of the drinkers perched dreamily on the bar stools, those disillusioned figures I had long thought of as my brother.”

Getting a bit better but what on earth is happening rn I’m like uncomfy like watching a freak couple

This book is bad I read it at night to help me fall asleep it’s so boring

If y’all saw the amount of notes I’m taking on this book y’all would shoot me man 😂😂 I guess I do like these kinds of books after all!! Sue me!!!

“Those who live for power are destroyed by power, those who live for money by money; service is the ruin of the servile, pleasure the ruin of the pleasure-seeker. Thus it was independence”

God I’m so annoying sorry guys. “The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”

I too often judge books like these based on the type of people that I think read them. I also think that the content won’t help me or it will help but could be condensed into 2 pages blah blah. Well the point is I have always judged without actually reading them, so I am going to challenge myself to not judge a book by its cover! Lol

I HATE this book so far mannnn goddd damn it but aye I’m gonna challenge myself to push through

Évariste Galois has such an interesting back story with math but my god he was like the most unlucky person ever 😭😭

“I didn’t even think about trying to prove it. Andrew Wiles was probably one of the few people on earth who had the audacity to dream that you can actually go and prove this conjecture.”

Idk why but I love when people do things even if everyone else says it’s impossible

Funny how at first I thought Penrose tilings were not really worth attention and then they talked about how useful they are. Goes to show not to judge something too quickly!

Super nice refresher of algorithms & data structures

Not sure how but this book does it but it’s both interesting and boring lol

“curious material, like the one sending the first half of his solution and promising the second if we would pay 1,000 DM in advance; or another one, who promised me 1% of his profits from publications, radio and TV interviews after he got famous, if only I would support him now; if not, he threatened to send it to a Russian mathematics department to deprive us of the glory of discovering him.” Would be me lol

“even the subsequent failed attempts to find the proof had generated innovative new techniques, such as proof by ‘infinite descent’ and the use of imaginary numbers” interesting to think about stuff like this where at first it seems like it’s not helpful or useful but ends up being super useful

“Count Guglielmo Libri-Carrucci dalla Sommaja”

What a name 😂😂😂

“The solution for Bombelli was to create a new number, i, called an imaginary number, which was simply defined as the solution to the question, What is the square root of negative one? This might seem like a cowardly solution to the problem, but it was no different to the way in which negative numbers were introduced.” Math was 100% invented not discovered LOL

It’ll get interesting then get boring again right after hahaha

“An Arab numerologist documents the practice of carving 220 on one fruit and 284 on another, and then eating the first one and offering the second one to a lover as a form of mathematical aphrodisiac”

Ok what is happening

“Euclid believed in the search for mathematical truth for its own sake and did not look for applications in his work. One story tells of a student who questioned him about the use of the mathematics he was learning. Upon completing the lesson, Euclid turned to his slave and said, ‘Give the boy a penny since he desires to profit from all that he learns.’ The student was then expelled.”
LMAO I love this? 😭

“Energy isn’t a kind of substance, like water or dirt. It’s a property that things have, depending on what they are and what kind of situation they’re in. There is no “energy fluid” that flows from place to place. There are simply objects that have positions and velocities and other properties, and we can associate a certain amount of energy with them because of those facts.”

So far pretty boring ngl 😅. I guess kind of interesting reading about Pythagoras but not this much lol

Hoping it gets better rn it’s just seemingly random math and math history

"Since we never find a distribution of meter readings, but always a single reading, and since quantum mechanics seems to predict only probability distributions, human consciousness must somehow induce the probability distribution to collapse. We can agree with Wigner that there is something about human beings that leads to this collapse..."

Just saying things no explanations at all or maybe I’m too dumb I’ll revisit this later in life

Last chapter and epilogue were fun and satisfactory answers to "Is physics invented or discovered?"

“Einstein said we cannot compare our theories with the real world. We can compare predictions from our theory with observations of the world, but we “cannot even imagine . . . the meaning of” comparing our theories with reality.”

“The minute we begin to talk about this world, it somehow becomes transformed into another world, an interpreted world, a world delimited by language—a world of trees, houses, quarks, and leptons. In order to deal with the world we have to talk about it (or measure it, or shape it—in any case we engage the world in terms of our symbols, whether we are building a pyramid or a Superconducting Super Collider).”