Listening: Justin Timberlake, "Cry Me a River"
Back in April, my BC Calc class was learning about Taylor series, and I decided to figure out whether there was a non-recursive formula for the nth derivative of a function. I spent two months (really, four weeks, because I put it down for a while) working on it, and by June I had the answer and an eight-page proof for it. I submitted it as my final project for the course, and made a presentation of it to my class. It was really impressive, by all accounts.
Fast-forward to August 11, when I had a meeting at Pace University in the city to show my work to a high-ranking professor. She was incredibly friendly, besides displaying a fluency in mathematical thought and discourse that I was beginning to believe didn't exist. She worked out two simple but diverse examples of my formula, expressed her surprise that it held for such different kinds of functions (polynomial and trigonometric, if you're keeping score at home), and said that she'd forward it to a friend of hers at UNC Chapel Hill. Most importantly, she said she'd never seen it before, which meant I might have an opportunity to publish it, breeze into college, and live happily ever after.
Except that she just emailed me back to say that the UNC professor had already known of the formula. It was impressive that I'd come up with it independently, but it was definitely not original.
And here I was strutting around in the meantime like I were a prodigious Mathematician, imagining myself opening a Priority Mail envelope to find a copy of the Whatever-Organization Journal of Mathematics with my name in the table of contents, acceptance letters, bragging rights, recognition, satisfaction.
She's still writing a letter for colleges describing the meeting and vouching that I did come up with everything independently, but I really had had the highest hopes. And now I'm a lowly peasant-child again.
Shit!
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