Just Around the Corner

It's hard to believe, but I leave in just over two weeks for Beijing. I remember last summer going by very quickly, and this summer, with my work at the lab split into two by this trip, will be no different. I have a couple more things to look forward to before leaving, such as visiting my brother in DC for the first time in a while, one more trip to State College to see all the folks who were in Jordan during my last visit, and trying to make at least some progress at work before leaving.

Oddly enough, at this point the main thing I'm worrying about is not the strange new culture I will be finding myself a temporary part of, it's the math I'll be doing. I have a couple of assignments from the spring portion of the class that have been sitting next to my desk at work leering at me for the past few weeks. Since high school I have always enjoyed math and felt fairly confident about my math abilities, but I am definitely feeling out of my element. Here's our "schedule," which clarifies these feelings of uncertainty a little bit more:

June 24: Student Arrival

June 25: Morning: Orientation

Afternoon: Two-point boundary value problem: General solutions and Green's functions
(2.1.1, 2.1.2) By Prof. Chun Liu.

June 26: Smoothness and Maximum principle
(2.1.3, 6.1) By Prof. Chun Liu

June 27: Culture activity

June 30: Two-dimensional elliptic equation: general solutions in a rectangular domain
(7.1, 7.2.1) By Prof. Chun Liu

July 1: Maximum principle
(6.4) By Prof. Chun Liu

July 2: One-dimensional parabolic equation: general solutions
(3.2,3,3) By Prof. Chun Liu

July 3: Finite difference method for elliptic equations
(2.2) By Xiantao Li

July 4: Maximum principle and convergence of the finite difference methods
(2.3) By Xiantao Li

July 7: Finite difference method for two-dimensional elliptic equations
(7.5) By Xiantao Li

July 8: Error estimate of the finite difference method
(7.6) By Xiantao Li

July 9: Finite difference method for parabolic equations
(4.1) By Xiantao Li

July 10: Stability analysis of the finite difference methods
(4.3, 4.5) By Xiantao Li

July 11: Implicit methods
(4.4) By Xiantao Li

July 14: Truncation error
(10.3) By Prof. Zhiping Li

July 15: Convergence analysis
(10.3) By Prof. Zhiping Li

July 16: Numerical method for 2D parabolic equations
(5.1)

July 17: Culture activities

July 18: Students departure

Somewhere in there we also have a final.

Doubts aside, I am definitely beginning to get excited. The class will be PKU students as well as PSU, so I will hopefully have a good opportunity to improve my Chinese as well as meet plenty of new people. I have also been working on my German in case I have to fall back on my "pretend I speak only German and Chinese to get people to talk to me in Chinese" plan. I have a fair amount of things left to do, such as getting an outlet converter and some software I will need, as well as making a t-shirt that says " 你认识他吗? " (Do you know him?) accompanied by a picture of Brian. I probably won't get around to that last one, but I still think it would be fun to test Brian's theory that everyone in China knows and loves him.

Until next time