Bumbling along

I have been bumbling along for the last two and a half weeks making slow progress with book AB2 on differentiation. I have got past the hard part of trying to understand the proof that the Blancmange function is nowhere differentiable. I did actually get stuck and resorted to asking for help from my tutor, Alan, but by the next morning (having slept on it) I realised it was all staring me in the face. Since then I have been learning about Rolle's Theorem and the Mean Value Theorem which I have come across before (but not in so much detail). It seems that as I inch closer and closer to the end of this course, so I seem to take longer and longer to finish a book.

I had a tutorial last Saturday and Alan managed to cover the whole of the first group theory block in an hour and a half (half an hour to say what was covered and an hour to go through some old TMA questions). Impressive! I keep thinking I will be able to sit back and relax and enjoy the ride, but I keep finding that there are bits that I think I don't know. I find myself thinking "how the hell do you do that again?" and a surge of panic rushes through me. It keeps me on my toes.

I am still making progress with the TMA's. TMA04 is done and handed over and I have done the first question of TMA05 which I quite enjoyed. I love the challenge of an interesting question.

I am disappointed that the OU is removing the Diploma qualification that I am working towards. Usually I would have had quite a few years to complete this. Now that I have to start this in a year or so, it is almost certainly going to put the nail in the coffin for my future study with the OU. I saw the diploma as a stepping stone, something to achieve and an encouragement for me to continue with my studies. It would have been a useful qualification to get, but now that I have to pass it by the end of 2014, I can't see myself having the energy to do the other course I need, MST209. M208 has nearly finished me off as it is. The dividing line between enjoying the course and finding it a burden has worn very thin and now I am being pressured into the next step it is pushing me into the 'no' mode. There are, after all, plenty of other avenues for my interests in maths which do not have strict timescales and exams and I suspect that when this course finishes in October, I will be off to explore these instead. It is the OU's loss!

One of the avenues I would like to get back to is my study of prime numbers. Before I started work at the OU I had done what I think now is some good work at understanding how to compute pi(n) - the number of primes less than n. One of the first things I think I will do is to try and explain what I did in a blog like this. It was all very interesting. Nothing new to anyone else I am sure, but it was an interesting exercise for someone who knows little about the subject and who enjoyed working it out for himself!