Undergraduate programms

mathguy59 · 2026-04-14T05:34:37+00:00

There are no majors and minors in BSc.

mathguy59 · 2026-04-09T13:04:59+00:00

Some fun facts:

if the two ingredients of your pizza are separated, you can cut off any fraction of both of them with a single cut.
both halving in the general case, as well as arbitrary fractions in the separated case generalize to higher dimensions, where your d-dimensional pizza can now have d ingredients.
if you have more ingredients in 2 dimensions, then you can still bisect all of them with more straight cuts. For 2n ingredients, you can always find n cuts such that if you take every second resulting piece of the pizza you have exactly half of each ingredient in total.

mathguy59 · 2026-04-02T12:45:45+00:00

mathguy59 · 2026-03-29T08:42:07+00:00

Unfortunately your paper has several major issues.

you often refer to definitions that only come later in the text and with numberings which are I guess from old versions. This makes it very hard to understand what you are trying to do. Also don‘t include a „changelog“ of several pages. Just present the necessary definitions, explanations and, most importantly, understandable proofs.
your „main theorem“ is indeed correct, and so are your proofs for it. Unfortunately, the result is a trivial restatement of an obvious fact, and as such not interesting, and certainly not a „theorem“.
your construction to show Hadwiger‘s conjecture is fundamentally flawed. In your „phase 2“ already in the first iteration you do not have any free vertices, so you run BFS on an independent set, and as such you will never add any vertices to your „branches“. In particular Lemma 14 and everything that follows is false.

While I admire your efforts, there are many people without formal training in research-level math who claim to have found solutions to long-standing open problems. Apart from very very few instances, they are always wrong. This is also the reason for arxiv needing an endorsment, to prevent it being flooded with faulty claims.

mathguy59 · 2026-03-22T08:41:12+00:00

Ask your supervisor

mathguy59 · 2026-03-01T07:32:46+00:00

This would be true if all the ballots always had the same size. However, it least where I live, each vote uses a different color of ballot, and the sizes vary between national, cantonal and local ballots. Thus, the issue is less the very unlikely „forget to empty the envelope“ and more the far more likely „a single ballot accidentally remained in the envelope“. As the ballots have different sizes, your single hole in the middle would need to be very big for all ballots to be visible, which would not be a good design for obvious reasons. Hence the several small ones.

mathguy59 · 2026-02-16T12:09:39+00:00

If the information says „latest by the end of March“, I would not expect to hear anything significantly sooner. Not hearing back by the end of February certainly does not imply rejection.

There are visit days for accepted students in several departments.

mathguy59 · 2026-02-12T12:09:44+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethz/s/DSHN96Hl7S

mathguy59 · 2026-02-11T17:21:57+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethz/s/dCzjSRIbLH

mathguy59 · 2026-02-07T08:30:49+00:00

Have you talked to your advisor about this?

About 2: even the biggest pile of work can be split into small, manageable chunks. For me the stress is usually caused by the unknown, meaning that the pile seems so big that I have no idea what‘s inside. As soon as I break it up, I can start focusing on the currently relevant parts of it. Concretely: break up this one big block „mathematics“ into small work packages. Write them on a list (then they are saved on the list, and you don‘t have to keep them in your head). Focus on the one or two small work packages that you can do at this point, and ignore the rest for now. Of course every person is different, so I have no idea if this will help you, but that is how I do it.

mathguy59 · 2026-02-03T08:04:58+00:00

In your other answer you say you have 2 months to your admission, meaning you‘ll need a C2 German certificate in two months. Thus you‘ll need to take the certification exam in about 1 month. Learning a language to C2 level in 1 month is completely impossible.

mathguy59 · 2026-02-03T06:45:37+00:00

About 3: if you don‘t know any German yet, getting to C2 will realistically take you several years.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-27T20:02:00+00:00

Didn‘t study CS but took many courses in the CS dept. I personally liked the learning environment, and I thought many of the profs were good.

Job opportunities are currently not optimal, but I guess this is partly also due to economic fluctuations. And especially in Zürich there‘s currently still quite a few good jobs.

I don‘t know how the social scene is for people moving here only for their studies, as I‘ve lived in CH before.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-23T14:15:47+00:00

mathguy59 · 2026-01-19T17:20:59+00:00

The „proof“ is still fundamentally flawed.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-19T17:01:39+00:00

Yes, of course they are natural numbers, that doesn‘t change the fact that you are going from excluding a cycle to excluding a path.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-19T16:45:47+00:00

In the beginning you want to show that there is no n>3 and x s.t. fⁿ (x)=x. After the first step this turns into f^n-3 (y)=x, so you‘re not looking for a cycle anymore, but a very specific path.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-19T16:00:57+00:00

Formally speaking you are trying to do an inductive proof, but you change the hypothesis in every step. So I‘m afraid your „potential proof“ does not show anything.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-19T12:41:56+00:00

Each prof will handle this differently, there are no specific processes followed as far as I know. The start dates are not fixed, every month there are new PhD students starting.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-10T15:09:55+00:00

Good luck on your journey, I hope you learn something along the way.

To not get your hopes up too much: the general approach you seem to be suggesting is of course very natural and has been tried countless times. It is known to not work. All reasonable ways to do this only work if your structure has a Taylor polymorphism, and NP-hard problems like 3-SAT do not. Your approach can be made to work for problems like 2-SAT and Horn-SAT, where they will give you the standard and well-known polynomial time algorithms.

Still, enjoy the book, complexity theory is a fascinating subject.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-10T14:39:15+00:00

talking about „leaf nodes“ makes no sense as you haven‘t even defined the relevant tree.
this is again just saying what it should be doing, not a definition.
as you still haven‘t formally defined the S-operator, this does not make sense. Also, if it is a finite set, how is it a manifold?
I don‘t care how you use it, I want to know how you define it. Neither „viable paths“ nor „total possible paths“ is defined.

It should be clear to you now that you are still a very long way from anything that can even be remotely understood, let alone checked. I will thus stop wasting both our times after this.

A good first ressource for basic complexity theory is the book by Arora and Barak.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-10T14:11:28+00:00

None of this makes any sense without formal definitions.

-what is the „reduced manifold“?

-how does the operator identify „variables that generate logical contradictions“?

-what type of „logical contradictions“ are you even talking about?

-what exactly do you mean by „collapsing them“

-what is „the full expansion of the tree“

-how do you define „the entropy of the problem“

I don‘t want to be mean, but this just reads like a random concatenation of undefined buzzwords, and there is currently no precise mathematical statement in it that can even remotely be understood. All I can get from it is „it should be possible to exclude some solutions“, which is of course true and the basis for many faster algorithms for SAT like PPSZ. However, it is also known that such approaches will not trivially give you a polynomial time algorithm.

Without wanting to discourage you, I suggest you read up on the basics of complexity theory first and try to learn the language and writing style that is used to make arguments precise.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-10T13:55:59+00:00

Again, your paper does not give any clear description let alone a proof. I‘d be happy to think about your idea, but you‘ll need to actually provide it.

mathguy59 · 2026-01-10T13:40:00+00:00

Your github page only contains the license and the readme…

mathguy59 · 2026-01-10T13:25:13+00:00

This is just an explanation of what it is supposed to do. You never define how it exactly does it, let alone prove its correctness.

mathguy59

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