Luana.me

Dear Sister Mileva Marić

Welcome to Luana.me sweethearts! From now on this blog will host my most personal entries, whilst Honey-Babe.net stays as my art, design and hobby blog (2017 EDIT: H-B.net is now closed).

So, this first post is especially dedicated to a wonderful woman from the past, Mileva Marić, first wife to Albert Einstein, physicist and woman of great moral values. You can read more about her at PBS.

Besides the fact she was a genius – albeit unrecognized – it was her personal story to attract me, a story that resembles my own under so many aspects (which I won’t mention here) that she feels like a sister to me, no longer just an historical character. Every time I reread Einstein’s biography by Walter Isaacson, I pay particular attention to the passages where Mileva is mentioned or portrayed.

Einstein made her suffer all through her earthly life, as a woman, as a wife and as a human being, so the least I could do for her was requesting a requiem Mass to remember her and pray for her soul. She’s very dear to my heart and I honestly can’t understand how and why Albert Einstein, a man of such great intellectual virtues, would depreciate a woman like Mileva after years of happy engagement and then marriage. Mileva was a brilliant physicist, a skilled Math student, a sensitive woman and a romantic albeit realist soul. She stayed by Albert’s side no matter the troubles she lived because of her looks (she was considered an ugly woman), her birth defects (a problem with her leg) and Einstein’s parents, especially his mother, who did not approve of her and considered her the ruin of her son’s life and career. She endured that all out of sincere love, a love that lasted until her very death; and until the very last day of her life, she wanted Albert happy.

What hurts me the most is that she died alone. 🙁 Perhaps one of her sons (or maybe both of them) she had with Einstein were by her sickbed before she exhaled the last breath; I want to hope so. But it was a sad end anyway.

I want Mileva to know that, no matter she died more than seventy years ago, there’s a sister on Earth who loves her. That’s me, and I want to hope I’m not alone.

Reflection On Studied Topics and Intuition

When you study, don’t just stop to the concepts you’re trying to fixate in your mind.

Discuss the concept with yourself, bring on some deep reflection.

Not just when you do it the topic will come up easier to learn and memorize, but you could come up with interesting ideas that will further your studies and make you advance in your curriculum.

Back in 2009, I was deeply involved with Discrete Mathematics as I was prepping for the exam. As I was relaxing in the afternoon, watching a Disney movie on DVD, I came up with an idea that I had to put down on paper.

The idea linked together two topics in Discrete Mathematics I was studying that day, relations and graphs.

Here is the exact copy from my note sheet from that very productive afternoon:

Let G=(V,E) be a connected, non-oriented graph, and let’s define a ρ b the relation between two nodes a and b, with ρ the relation symbol:

a ρ b ⇔ there exists at least one walk between a and b

R: a ρ a ⇔ there exists a walk from a to a (it’s the size 0 walk)

S: a ρ b ⇒ b ρ a, a ρ b if there exists a walk from a to b; b ρ a if there exists a walk from b to a

T: a ρ b ∧ b ρ c ⇒ a ρ c, with

• a ρ b: there exists a walk from a to b
• b ρ c: there exists a walk from b to c
• a ρ c: there exists a walk from a to c

(Graph created with http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4189520/GraphJS/graphjs.html and a bit of hand-drawing. It’s not great, I know… ^^”)

Forced to interrupt my studies. I’ll do it