Which applies to wetware systems as well as others.
I’ve heard this, but it was about the Soviet government’s scientists and cockroaches. Are you sure that isn’t an urban legend?
Very sure.
Because it’s a joke. 
My Masters thesis in one sentence.
There’s a shitload of stuff on the internet.
“As per my professor’s pet theory, various people should be shot in the face.”
There’s this thing that happens in fruit flies that no one really cares about, but we’ve figured out how to make a tenuous connection to a human disease in a vain attempt to get people to pay attention. Anyway, we had an idea that maybe this thing was affected by the protein we study in the lab, so I checked. It turns out that it has nothing at all to do with it in any way, so instead here’s a pile of data that implies that it perhaps involves these two other proteins that just happen to be much sexier and attractive to funding agencies.
“…and may lead to a cure for cancer.” Never forget that in grant proposals.
Well you asked, so here goes. Does anyone here, except me, have any idea what any of it means?
“In degrees 2,3, and 4, the Harrison cohomology groups of a commutative algebra over a field of characteristic 0 are retracts of the Hochschild cohomology groups.”
I know what a group and a field are. I’ve worked with vector spaces and Grassman algebras, but I don’t know the general definition of an algebra. I think I used to know what a homology was, but beyond that I am lost.
When things get that technical and abstract, it is hard to put it into a sentence that others can understand.
Yes, but only after having to look up Harrison cohomology. (In fact, the reference I found refers to a computation in dimensions <= 4 from a certain doctoral thesis. I hope that’s yours, since it sounds like a nifty result.)
Mine was pretty uninteresting: “Fundamental groups of a particular class of closed manifolds have a certain kind of regularity that looks interesting but is nothing of the sort; in fact, it’s a complete dead end.”
My parents spent 120,000 on my education and all they got was this lousy sentence.
My undergrad senior thesis: Physics students write better scientific lab reports if they have a rubric and practice it several times.
My masters thesis: students learn science well in groups with hands on activities.
Not funny. Really quite boring and predictable.
My Big Published Paper: Picking the right method to run a bunch of chemical predictions which will work better once we get bigger computers.
My undergrad project: Picking the right method to run a bunch of statistical calculations; this will work better if the computer used has more than one hamster.
Yeah, there was a theme to it.
Well since you asked and I have no reason to hide my identity, I will say that yes it was mine. Whether or not it was nifty is in the eyes of the beholder. It was an insane computation (it involved showing that linear combination of all 24 elements of S_4 was idempotent–by squaring it).
Five years later I found a non-computational proof that worked in arbitrary dimensions and that was a neat result. And resulted in the discovery of a connected chain of idempotents, one in each S_n. That was a really nifty result.
Cool. I found the same reference to your thesis work. (I still have no clue what a Harrison cohomology is). We have some very impressive members here. Congratulations on a distiguished career in mathematics.
Undergrad: Helicopters where opposite blades are identical but adjacent ones are not will shake themselves to death less than when they are all identical.
Masters: You can model shape memory alloys as a combination of physical springs, friction elements, and dashpots, which for some reason may be good.
Doctoral: If you wiggle helicopter blades in a special way they will make less noise, and here is a quick way to see how much.
I’m ashamed to submit this one because the rest of you are so witty.
First Master’s Thesis: Rare books/documents/papery materials conservatorship requires extensive knowledge of chemistry, some art supplies, special lighting, climate control, and really steady hands.
Masters Project: I manufactured paper using techniques of the 1700s.
Oh, Gd, I’m dull.
Kierkegaard. Or how I learned to love the bomb
Masters: “It’s possible to use swarm-based optimisation techniques to make virtual animals run a lot faster, but you end up with some really weird animals as a result.”
Spiffy, I’ll have to look that up when I get a chance (and look up Harrison cohomology in more detail, which I don’t think I’ve seen at all outside of this context). Thanks!