Its been a little over a month at IU and the experience has been overwhelming. As has been since when I can remember I have gotten myself involved in more things than I can handle – which is another way of saying that things have been fun, atleast when I am able to keep up with them.

Like Hogwarts, the university is dotted with signs of greatness from antiquity. And every once in a while you come across some one who can do things to your mundane set of ideas that is no lesser than of Gandalf.

 
Pictures from around the Indiana University Campus

I have been hit by some hard ideas and fortunately I had been preparing my mind for a while to handle these – had I not and had I tried to absorb them at the same rate now, I might have been in for some hardship.

Lindley Hall, Computer Science Dept

 I have formally enrolled for Operating Systems by Andrew Lumsdaine, Programming Languages by Dan Friedman and Quantum Programming by Amr Sabry.

OS is primarily to scratch an old itch – because of that incomplete OS I left behind in college – this course gets to complete is half done os161 kernel – so there is a lots of traditional C programming there.

Programming Languages essentially covers the whole of ‘Essentials of Programming Languages’ with Prof Friedman saying things like ‘I will let you know when you need to think’, on day one. Most of us are thinking pretty hard already. This year the course also covers the new logic system he worked on with Will Byrd and Oleg Kiselyov called Mini-Kanren (source-forge is not as updated as it should be). This also forms the basis for his third ‘little’ book – The Reasoned Schemer.  

Quantum Programming is … well a course about magic – it’s a huge thinking exercise about creating a model of computation for possible ‘quantum machines’. I will not venture to say much more here, except drop a link to an introductory paper.

OS and PL are supposed to be among the hardest courses in the CS department, many people don’t advice taking them both together. To put things in perspective, I am finding QP the hardest simply because of the breadth of the computer science from which the ideas in QP are coming from. The present state of QP is a little like the state of classical computing in the times of Church and Turing.

 
Kirkwood Hall and the walkway by Lindley

That aside, I am looking into some of these things as of right now (this is not a complete list)
-        join calculus, pi calculus and other process calculi
-        squiggol (Bird and Meertens formalism)
-        quantum circuits
-        grokking functional programming Haskell-style
-        logic programming

All of this aside, Bloomington is a beautiful place - small university town with lots of charm and a pleasant weather (for now). I am told that this place has bad winters with lots of snow.

I have a small single bedroom apartment that is a ~12 min walk from the university.

The red square is Lindley Hall, the main CS department building and the green square is my apartment.
(Courtesy: Google Earth)

And among other things, I have a new weapon – its called Qubit. Qubit is a Dell Inspiron 9300, UXGA 17” monitor, with 1Gb ram, 256 mb Nvidia Geforce 6800 graphics card and a dual layer Dvd writer.