# nate stemen

## A week #5

Literally no idea what happened last week.

# School

I finished my Lie theory homework and am not much less confused about how roots and weights work. I'm still working through some of the basics. It's getting better, but only slowly, and new material is coming fast. Kevin said to me today being a math grad student is about “learning how to do math, not understand it” and that feels very accurate. I have no time to understand it!

I've also submitted a final project idea for OQS about unitary $t$-designs and twirling. I've only just started thinking about the project, but expect to hear more later.

# Work

We had a hackathon! I did one thing, but kinda two:

• learned some Rust
• started working on a zine in $\LaTeX$

Rust was sweet because I've never really learned a typed language, and even though we were doing hello world type exercises in the language, it was really fun thinking about, and being explicit with types. Not only that, but also the Rust compiler is able to catch many types of bugs before code ever leaves your machine! Really cool, and I'd definitely like to learn more.

I know at Quantum Benchmark (the startup my advisor Joel co-started) they use C++, and I've often seen Rust advertised as a safer and easier, and more fun version of C++. So there might be some learning I get to do there. not sure.

As for the zine, I did two things. I took an example LianTze Lim wrote a while back for pocketmods and turned it into a slightly user friendly version. I'm now using that user friendly version to write a “common $\LaTeX$ mistakes in math” zine that I will put on my website, and maybe distribute at conferences and such if those ever happen in person again. It's been fun making, and I hope to one day make it a class file and put it on CTAN. I mostly want to make zine creation more accessible for people who use $\TeX$ as their main means of communication.