At the University of Oregon, all the economist and economist-light ⊕ Here, “economist-light” just means all the business school disciplines; finance, marketing, accounting, etc. folks take a three week math camp designed to get them up to speed on everything they could ever possibly hope to know about the mathematics used in economics.

Math camp started on Wednesday, August 29th, and so far I have had three math camp sessions which have shown me how little I know about absolutely anything.

One of the biggest problems with being (i) mostly self-taught and (ii) highly computational is that I am not at all prepared for the abstract nature of so much of what mathematics is at its heart. Proofs, for example, remain mostly alien to me. Until Wednesday I had never written a proof of any kind, ⊕ If you saw the proofs I have written down since Wednesday, you might say that I still have yet to right one. and I have never been in a math class so far removed from numbers or expressions that are grounded in \(ℝ^{1-3}\) are largely beyond my ken.

Fortunately I am learning a tremendous amount of new things. So far we’ve covered:

1. Vectorspaces
2. Subspaces
3. Spans
4. Bases
5. Kernels
6. Linear maps

There’s been a total of eight questions on the homework so far, which require about 2-4 hours of my considerably-useless time. Honestly, I am having a lot of fun being in the dark on all this stuff, as it’s kind of what I signed up for with the whole doctorate thing.