I just started my URSS with being given a complicated title and some papers I don’t understand. I’m told it’s actually very simple, but from the outside it certainly doesn’t feel so.
I set out on the quest for my rabbit. Once I see the fluffy tail of the rabbit, and can identify which one is the right rabbit. It’s simply a question of going down the rabbit hole, until nothing makes sense without 4/5 hours of explaining. This is what I feel research will be like.
I’ve been going through the shorter of the papers, hoping it would also be the simpler one. It was also the paper my supervisor told me to start with, so one can hope it is simple. A few lines in I’m already met with words I have heard in passing but never understood and simple words which I do understand attached to words I don’t, meaning even the little hope I had of understanding it was lost.
Marc advised that I go through the paper slowly and it should start to make much more sense. So I take a large piece of paper and write down these words, look up their definitions and try to understand each one and continue. All of a sudden, I see a white hair. It looks like a rabbit.
Upon closer inspection, I had caught a glimpse of the rabbit. Soon after I found the whole of the rabbit.
The rabbit, for those wondering, was I needed to compute an initial “Perfect Form” given from a brute force search in O^2 where O is the maximal order in Q(-sqrt(d)) where d was my input. Still seems hard to grasp, but at least it was digestible.
I start to code comments of the break points and get started on catching up to the rabbit. As well as understanding more of the definitions. In time, I think it’s doable. Rome wasn’t build in a day.
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