I didn't see a thread for member introductions so I thought I'd make one (delete if it is unneeded/a duplicate). Basically I figured there'll be new people posting on this forum, so it'd be nice to know a little more about them than a cryptic username :)

Sooo, hi o/ I'm Christian, a 1st year MMath student. I'm from the Isle of Man, and living in Jack Martin atm. I like to play badminton, tennis and snooker, although I enjoyed the lacrosse taster session enough to do it regularly. More geekier interests include computer games and anime, but I don't have much time to do them any more :) My favourite film genre is horror, or gory low-budget Japanese films, and I listen mainly to rock music (still obsessed with Audioslave atm)

I'm studying Mathematics because I enjoy it, and I know that it will keep my interest and give me a challenge over the next four years.

OK, everyone else's turn :)

I'm a third year mathematician with a penchant for politics, theatre, music of almost all kinds (no thankyou justin timberlake!) and a cheeky dabbling in philosophy.

I'm from The South (near guildford- very middle class!) and I am doing maths because my college teacher (normally so calm!) told me I was "fucking stupid not to be doing maths" (which was conclusive).

Since starting here 2 years ago, after the initial period of "I'm just doing it cos I'm good at it", I've really started to dig the discipline and I am now social sec.

Other things I like are (in no particular order): cats, fractals, food, wine, cheesy action films, big thinker films, my girlfriend, novels, poetry, suit jackets and offbeat comedies starring bill murray.

-ToM

Hi,

My real name is Steven Jones, one of a few in the dept, I really really like mathematics, and commas.

I'm a third year, MMath geek, currently slated to do 186 CATS (<-- not good). I'm the one came into the lectures at the start of term shouting about how cool the WMS is going to be. This is quite cool, as I get a 'that's that guy, from that thing' look as I go around the maths building.

Originally from Weston-super-Mare, Steve now lives in the not-so-sunny Coventry. When I'm not mathsing it up I like to go climbing or general gymming or riding my bike. I ride said bike to uni, and its really bitching, carbon forks etc etc.

Why do I study Mathematics? If you see me out an about, and have ten to fifteen minutes to spare, just ask!

Regards
Steven Jones

Right, my turn...

I'm Jamie Sawyer, a 3rd year MMath student, who like Steven is a bit overCATted atm (although I HAVE TO CUT BACK... after last year... trust me on this, do NOT do 180 CATs. Ever.) I am from Reading, live in Leamington (north - the posher end ;) ), DJ for Offbeat¹, have hitchiked to Dublin and Amsterdam with RAG (I suggest it to everyone and anyone), have done a Jailbreak and ended up in Amsterdam (there's not a theme emerging, honest!), am studying generally Dynamical Systems and Topology (apparently it's what I'm good at...), and am a Lost addict (as will all you new 1st years if DC++ is available still).

Also, like Steven, I have a "You may recognise me from..." thing, but mine is SO much cooler :P I was on Beauty and the Geek on E4 + Channel 4 back at easter time (repeated quite recently though) :D Yay for TV fame :D

Yeah, anyway, any questions or anything (maths or otherwise) email me or leave a message here or something :)

Oh, and I'm running the sessions, and writing the tutorial for WMS :D - Everyone join in, it's really useful, and not really difficult!

------------
Jamie Sawyer

¹ I say I DJ for Offbeat, but this is not necessarily accurate... I haven't DJed for over 1.5 years (excluding WMS), and I don't really DJ indie like most Offbeat people do - they call themselves the ALTERNATIVE music society, so therefore I can play anything from Death Cab for Cutie to Coheed and Cambria via Lemon Jelly on the way...

A celebrity? Awesome :D You were one of the beauties, right?

Hi,

I'm Alex (1st year MMath), I'm from yorki Leeds, I'm staying in claycroft because it's closest to the maths block. I am a real ale activist, i do Thai boxing, play pool, play guitar (poorly), practice nunchucks, i luv films and any music heavier than (not including) indie.

I was going to do medicine but i missed the ucas deadline, then decided on chemistry, and then the day before the final ucas deadline chose mathematics. I have always enjoyed maths but rebelled for some reason. I have no idea why i didn't choose maths in the first place. Nor does anyone else. I'm very disorganised.

I guess I might as well do this too, though I was quite busy procrastinating. I'm Cosmin, also a 1st year MMath, originally from Romania (though I live in the south of France outside of term) and also living in Jack Martin.

I find a lot of things interesting/enjoyable, some of which are: Maths, Physics (more or less any type of science actually), computers (just about anything related to them), music (mainly metal/rock, my favorite band is Tool) playing drums, American Football (and a few other sports), reading, (brackets), chess, snowboarding, movies, and all things geeky :p. The areas of maths I'm most interested in are Number Theory (especially analytic) and Combinatorics, but I don't think there is any area of maths I don't find interesting. My favorite identity might be Euler's pentagonal number theorem (I wanted to put it here too but I can't use \prod or \in on the forum, is this a bug? Anyway, the second proof (bijection) on wikipedia is quite nice, I had taken it off (yes, you guessed it) my favorite math book, ``Proofs from the Book'', which I would really reccomend to just about anyone (lots of elegant proofs of cool theorems, from Bertrand's Postulate and Wedderburn's theorem to Hilbert's third problem to the five-color theorem and Cayley's formula for the number of labled trees, endless fun :p)).

On a wackier note, I've managed (with a friend) to manipulate pretty much the most important newspaper in the Philippines (it's a pretty long (but rather funny) story) into writing a series of articles about a guy named Edgar Escultura (quite the crackpot, thinks he's proven that Fermat's Last Theorem is false and 0.999... isn't equal to 1 (\neq doesn't work either by the way :p), as well as developping a complete theory of quantum gravity, and of human intelligence...) starting with one on how he had proven Wiles wrong (which was completely accidental, unlike the next few) and culminating in a sunday front page (which I still have somewhere around here in pdf form, they seem to have taken the articles off the site, it happened about a year ago; I think they're still on a few blogs here and there though) article about how he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize (along with, incidentally, a physics teacher I really didn't like from high school, Escultura even sent him some articles by post =D), which means I'm sort of indirectly and anonymously (which makes a lot of sense) famous in the Philippines!

Thats all I can think of for now, and I need to stop writing anyway... See you all around.

Cosmin: You mean:

I love admin powers :P

Jamie

How come I can't do that :O? It says ``Unallowed command detected!'' when I try to use quite a few commands, even \lambda hehe.

Should be much easier to do now, I'll even get round to making it match the background colour!

Regards
Steven Jones

With all the new members, I thought I'd bump this forum thread to the top!

Don't be shy!

Say hello, even if you said 'ello before, tell us what's changed.

------------

Regards
Steven Jones
Magazine and Website Editor
The Warwick Mathematics Society

My main goal in the next 4 years is to solve all the remaining Clay Institute problems before anyone else and get all the prizes. (Or not)
There are just so many things that look (and certainly are) deeply fascinating, can't wait to discover. The maths society is a great way to get some insight to what's going on there !

Ah, I thought there would be a thread like this XD See my introduction thread XD

--

Days until I start at Warwick: Too many! ^_

Haha, was going to accuse you of thread-copying, but I see it's mine :P Welcome to forums

I may as well introduce myself since I never did, I'm Orry (for everyone that hasn't worked it out yet, that is my actual name) 2nd year MMath student from the Isle of Man and living in Coventry.
I do Maths because it was pretty much my best subject since about year 2, and I also think its pretty fun. I'm not sure which caused which. I rarely bother to read about it in my spare time though.
I play computer games almost compulsively, enjoy a tasty beverage* from time to time, and some day soon** I'm going to start getting new music again since my collection stagnated sometime around 2005. That's all for now.

*not beer
**I've been saying this for a while.

someone make this sticky

I thought I might as well re-introduce myself and revive the thread. I'm Cosmin, third year mathematician and currently the "Talks Coordinator" for the society. This means I'm mainly in charge of organising Discussion Groups (if you don't know what that is yet, you'll hear more about very shortly!), a few big talks, some crash courses and other stuff like that, but I generally try to get involved as much as I can with everything the WMS does. I live in north Leam during term and in the south of France otherwise (though I'm in fact from Romania and have lived there until moving to France when I was 11).

The main reason I do maths is pretty simple: I find it extremely interesting and fun. I think pretty much any area of maths has at least some appeal (yeah, even stats :P) but none as much as number theory, which I guess you could say is my speciality (you'll no doubt notice that if you turn up to a few discussion groups/hear me ranting for hours about the Riemann Zeta function and the Prime Number Theorem). That having been said, I do tend to quickly get bored/frustrated when I don't like the way in which maths is taught, which led to me turning up to a grand total of two lectures in my second year (something which I don't really recommend :P) even though I later realised that some of them were in fact pretty interesting. I'm enjoying the third year so far, considering there are no core modules and a decent number of good ones to choose from. I plan to study maths even further after I graduate, i.e. get a PhD and hopefully work as a research mathematician/lecturer.

I do enjoy a huge range of things beside maths (as a matter of fact, I think that virtually anything can be interesting if viewed from the right perspective :P) as well, such as listening to music (more or less any genre as long as it's "good" but especially jazz (e.g. Davis, Jarrett, Hancock, Evans, Coltrane, Jaco, etc.) and classic rock (mainly Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Cream)), playing music (I play quite a few instruments (drums, guitar, bass, toaster, piano) but none of them extremely well for the moment :P), computers and video games, teh internets, manx oak smoked cheddar, memes, sports (American football (which I play at university), basketball, snowboarding, cycling (I do about 16 miles of it per day riding to campus and back) and many more which I don't necessarily practice regularly but enjoy all the same), reading (again, a fairly wide range of things, from literature to textbooks (not exclusively maths) through newspapers and random websites and just about anything else through which I can learn something new and interesting) and over 9000 other random things which I'm too lazy to mention right now.

Well, I may as well continue this trend.
I am Ben, currently Academic Support officer of the society, which means I am in charge of the weekly Maths Cafe event, and am also responsible for organising any crash courses that people request (though this is also partly Cosmin's department, as he himself did admit). I have lately been trying to aquire books in the hope of getting a little "maths society library" started. It probably won't start lending books in the near future, but I would like to make that happen in the long run if possible.

My main mathematical interests are abstract algebra (which freshers will get their first taste of in term 2), formal logic and set theory. I do often enjoy other areas of maths, though, and have thouroughly enjoyed many of the topics that have come up at our twice-weekly discussion groups.

I tend to put a lot of energy into everything I do, and consequenty tire myself out - look for my sleeping form in random places throughout the department. I enjoy thinking deeply about things in general, and I suppose you could say this is my main hobby, and the main reason why maths seem so fun to me.

When I'm not doing maths, I'm normally playing computer games, reading webcomics, enjoying some fairy tale/fantasty/surreal fiction (whether in book or film form), or indeed reading the Bible or praying (I really should spend more time on this last one - it's difficult to maintain any close relationship if one party doesn't talk to the other).

Hello all!

I'm Owen and I currently stand as this year's WMS magazine editor. The good news is that there is currently a magazine in the works, although just when it will be ready is still a mystery... Keep an eye out for it though.

I've just started my second year on the Warwick maths course, and although I find it a struggle (I probably hold the distinction of being the worst mathematician to ever find their way onto the exec... anyone challenge this claim?) I still love a good bit of mathematics.

Outside of the course I run my own theatre company; although it has been dormant in the last 12 months, it is currently in the stages of resurrection with the intention to produce a piece of mathematical-theatre which will most likely be aimed at the next group of freshers (09/10).

I'm fairly easy to locate in the maths department: look out for bright green jackets, silly hats, a cheeky hipflask, or perhaps even face paint... (hmm, perhaps for the Integrating Factor???)!

Have lots of fun.

Owen.

Hi I'm Alex (the challenge to Owen's worst mathematician on exec claim) I'm currently the social sec, so I run all the socials. You need lots of mathematics ability to be social sec as you might imagine. "Integrating Factor next week, Wednesday, 7.30". Sorry that's a weird speech impediment I've developed recently.

I'm now in my 3rd year, and things are getting difficult. I do like my course (wouldn't it be great if everyone could admit it). I, like Cosmin, enjoy the number theory and combinatorics side of mathematics but am nowhere near as good at it. I also dabble in combinatorial optimisation and algorithms, despite being a poor programmer. If I were more intelligent I'd be trying to solve the travelling salesman problem.

On the less geeky side of things my hobbies include compulsive real ale drinking, cycling from lem (80 miles pw!), martial arts enthusiasm (nunchaku), almost all films (Tarrentino, Matrix, Fight Club, In Brughes... all in a non-teenagerish way I hope), ska punk (JB conspiracy, sonic boom 6, random hand, LTJ), oversleeping, starting unwinnable arguments and finding new and creative ways of breaking copyright.

Hey everybody I'm Zhong, a fresher doing just a BSC in Math but am considering changing to the MMath course. Things have been interesting so far, but I'm starting to suspect that I'm slightly overdoing myself with the options. Believe me, 169.5 CATS is no joke... Anyhow, my other interests include tennis, reading (I did English Literature as an A Level), computer and listening to music. Am trying to pick up aikido and some French while I'm in Warwick too. I'm from Malaysia btw, and this is my first time in Europe. I SHOULD be pretty easy to spot in lectures, being one of the only few Asians wearing a long sleeve shirt everyday to class. Anyhow, nice to see you guys around =)

Oh yea on another note, it seems I can't access the manuals for learning LaTeX on the WMS site?? Maybe Steve might be able to look into this?? Am interested in picking this up haha.

That's a bit odd, they seem to work for me. Try again a little later, you should normally be able to use them. I think it sometimes takes some time for new members to access those parts of the website due to the fact that the website needs to check your membership with the SU website, or something similar, so if you had just joined it might have been that.

Before we get into a long debate about this, I personally (exec powers and all) cannot access the Learn Latex pages. I've passed the problem on to Gary our website editor. Classes for Latex should be starting around week 6 this term. When they start everything will be up and running. Promise.

You twit, you haven't entered your university number into your profile.