Nurture 2010

The Math Nurture camp at ISI Delhi in June-July 2009, was one of the best, or probably the best summer camp I've been to. With the amount of guys I became close to, and the amount of chatting and idling and studying we did, it was an amazing experience. So, expectations for the 2010 edition were obviously pretty high. Everyone wanted a rehash of the previous year. But as ill-fated as it was from the beginning, people started dropping out of the camp more than a year in advance, when a few people announced their vehemence in doing an intern after their second year right there. The number kept piling on. On the course of my December project in IISc, Bangalore, I found out that even Manyu, Don and CSK weren't coming. A little into the next semester, Shailu pulled out too. Bharath and PGM were supposed to be coming, and Bharath pulled out just into summer. As for Pradeep, the typhoid pulled him out.

So, that left camp starters at 8 people, Glucon, Utkarsh, Garg, Tiwari, Anuj, Priyanka, Parul (a student of MT sir who was doing a project under him) and me. So began Nurture Camp 2010. This was quite an experience, in the sense that, all camps I'd previously attended, with a camp period worth noting, had anything more than 15 people in it. For the first time, we had 5 hostel inmates (Tiwari and Garg commuted from home!). As with the teaching, as expected it was a great experience. Bapat lectured on matrix theory this time, talking about generalised inverses, Moore-Penrose inverses, and Group inverses among others. His classes were among the thinkable, but going over the head types. Maneesh Thakur sir, our camp co-ordinator last year, for all purposes was the co-ordinator this year too, except for probably the official records. With our co-ordinator Abhay Bhatt, hardly even meeting up with us, it was MT sir, who looked after almost everything here. As an extra, he had his Galois theory classes dispersed across the two weeks. His lectures were definitely very OHT, but the basis was very good that, if one reads up Galois theory sometime post this camp, he should soon come to terms with it. Then, of course, the toast of this year's camp was definitely the probability. Too many probability classes, with an awesome Antar Bandhopadhyaya doing the axiomatic approach, and Amitesh Dasgupta, taking the problematic approach, quite literally. For once, I could see beyond Uma, who taught us a probability course in insti. The axioms here were clear, and issue-free, and bought a relief to the mind. Rahul Roy did a complex analysis course, which in part was unnecessary, and the amount covered was even not as much covered in an IIT's complex analysis course. Other than these main lectures, we had guest lectures. One on p-adic numbers, an amalgam of group theory and number theory. Another on the Fermat's Last Theorem, a very sad account of it indeed, while one was expecting a better "story". Sivaramakrishnan Sivasubramaniam (a name MT sir considers musical), who did core classes last year was a guest lecturer this year, and did some nice generating functions. Arunava Sen was awesome in his one game theory lecture. Finally, the quantum computing guest lecture was loads informative, but let a lot left to be done with respect to the feel and the rigour.

That was about the classes. As with the food, it was as good and bad as last year. Patches were brilliant. The Rasna and biscuits at 11 in the morning, and the Nimbu paani and snacks at 3 in the evening were awesome. But majorly, hostel time was spenting loning on the internet, or otherwise, watching movies. A few phone calls would have helped, but I didn't have exorbitant cash on the prepaid card to make calls as I wished either. The WiFi in the campus helped big time, as without the internet I don't have any idea about what I'd have done. A good deal of TT was played, but games like footer or baddy which started off in the first couple of days were abandoned quite soon. So, in a lot of senses, it was quite a boring camp too, and we counted down days right till the end. Today is the last day, and I'm ironically up so soon, the earliest I've seen the sun in the last two weeks. So, I thought in the time I had, I might as well make a post about this year's camp. Glucon's ever haunting music touch, Garg's nitty-witty chats, and Tiwari's movie sense, made my camp though! Nurture 2010, definitely nurtured, but would have been more fun, with more participation!