# ESP Biography

## WEIMING QIN, A great teacher of memes and an undergrad.

Major: Chemistry

College/Employer: Boston College

## Brief Biographical Sketch:

The result of evaluation fibration of mapping spaces extends to more general evaluation maps between mapping spaces. One way to interpret that result is that the inclusion C∞(S,p;M,q)→C∞(S,M) has a tubular neighbourhood. Providing M has enough diffeomorphisms, this is true of more general inclusions where they are defined by “coincidences”. That is to say, if P is a condition on maps S→M that prescribes where certain points “coincide”, then the submanifold of C∞(S,M) of smooth maps satisfying this condition will have a tubular neighbourhood in the manifold of all smooth maps.

## Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

C13886: Information Psychology and Surveillance in the Modern Era in Spark 2020 (Mar. 14 - 15, 2020)
Topics include massive-scale emotional contagion, GAN-based dopamine pathway manipulation, browser fingerprinting and ISP-level supercookies, and other fascinating explorations in the cyber realm.

M13887: Category Theory: An Introduction to Category Theory, a Theory of Categories in Spark 2020 (Mar. 14 - 15, 2020)
I can illustrate the ... approach with the ... image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months — when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado! A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration ... the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it ... yet finally it surrounds the resistant substance.'' —Alexander Grothendieck on simplicity and generality

H13893: Introduction to Old Icelandic in Spark 2020 (Mar. 14 - 15, 2020)
A brief introduction to Old West Norse, the literary and practical language of Iceland around the turn of the millennium: onwards from the island's Norse settlement in 874. We'll quickly run over the history of the people of Iceland and their language's grammar, and spend some time trying to parse some easy texts from authentic Icelandic.

H13894: Readings in Old Icelandic in Spark 2020 (Mar. 14 - 15, 2020)
Can't get enough Old Norse at Spark? Come read through the first few paragraphs of an actual Icelandic saga in the original!

H12937: Introduction to Old Icelandic in Spark 2019 (Mar. 16 - 17, 2019)
A brief introduction to Old West Norse, the literary and practical language of Iceland around the turn of the millennium: onwards from the island's Norse settlement in 874. We'll quickly run over the history of the people of Iceland and their language's grammar, and spend some time trying to parse some easy texts from authentic Icelandic.

P12944: Chemistry through Memes: an Introduction to Chemistry through Memes in Spark 2019 (Mar. 16 - 17, 2019)
Two chemists go into a bar. The first one says "I think I'll have an $${H}_{2}O$$". The second one says "I think I'll have an $$H_{2}O$$ too" — and he died. If the bartender had taken our class, he'd have been okay. Don't want to end up like him? Chemis-TRY to sign up for this class now!

M12946: Cocker's Arithmetick: How Math Used To Be Taught in Spark 2019 (Mar. 16 - 17, 2019)
Published 1677, Cocker's Arithmetick taught elementary algebra to generations of English-speaking students. Written in an abstruse and overly complicated style with almost no accompanying illustrations whatsoever, it was a standard for nearly two hundred years, teaching such pre-eminent figures as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Simpson, after whom Simpson's Rule from calculus is named.

H12947: Readings in Old Icelandic in Spark 2019 (Mar. 16 - 17, 2019)
Can't get enough Old Norse at Spark? Come read through the first few paragraphs of an actual Icelandic saga in the original!

M12950: The Principle of Explosion in Spark 2019 (Mar. 16 - 17, 2019)
What's wrong with contradictions, anyway? We're taught from a young age that certain things are wrong because they contradict other things we know to be true. Why can't they both be true? We examine the law of non-contradiction and connect it to computer science through a series of paradoxes as time permits.