I almost forgot about this over the last few months, so here's what's been happening in 22600

I’ve finished all my exams. I did terrible, but they won’t count the grades, probably because this is the last term of K-12 and everyone’s tired.

It actually took a lot of work for me to disassociate school grades with how good I could be as a mathematician. Every now and then, I would mess around with unsolved math problems, and come up with all sorts of messy ideas in an attempt to solve them (I rarely got anywhere though). Then, when I had to go back to doing school work, I would feel like messing around with those problems was such a delusional way to waste time, because schoolwork is just so different, being a rat-race of who could do exercises the fastest. After all, schoolwork was the thing that was going to get me where I want, not my messy ideas (unless one of them turns out to work perfectly, and I get lauded as a prodigy or something, which is very unlikely).

Now, I don’t care how delusional this seems, but I’m going to stop being ashamed of wasting time on those problems, and mess around to my hearts content! Besides, Bertrand Russel once said “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”, and messing around fulfills my urge to create to some extent, so I don’t have to spend so much time composing (which is too risky to do in my household).

Anyway, It’s the start of the long Summer break for every student in Australia. I get a slightly longer break because I go to a high-pressure school that rushes through everything and makes up for it with longer holidays.

I can never make progress fast enough to make messing around the main thing I do; I normally just come up with something and get stuck, so I’m going to spend most of Summer break reading and doing exercises from Baby Rudin, and Computability and Logic by Boolos et al. I tried doing this last year’s Summer break with the goal of finishing Computability by the end (which is unrealistic now that I think about it), and I got to chapter 7 of 27 before I burned out and had to give up. Oh well. At least I learned a lesson: don’t rush mathematics.

I’m going to continue on from chapter 7 with Computability, but I’m not very far into Baby Rudin, which is such a famous book that if you look it up, there are links to it for free. Does anyone want to be study buddies?