Toni Budimir's blog

Hi all!

It has been a couple of weeks since I wrote my last blog. In the last two weeks, I had exams so I had to study a lot. Luckily the exams went pretty well so I think I past most of them. Now all that is left is wait for the results. In the week before the exam, I went to the university library to study. Here there were at least a couple of hundred students studying but it was still not very noisy. However, since I now have my own apartment near the University, I decided to change locations to my own room. Here I could focus better on studying.

Furthermore I had my Bachelor’s degree ceremony. In October there was also such a ceremony but I was not able to go at that time so I went this time. There were still about 40 people of my Faculty that had to receive there diploma. First there was a talk from the dean and of a professor. Then everyone got called one by one to the stage to give a small talk about their thesis. Afterwards there were some drinks in the faculty bar which is situated in the basement.

Next week lectures start again as normal. Most courses will continue as before but I will also have a new course about sustainability. This is a compulsory course for all Mathematics students and I heard it will teach us how to make decisions while taking into account the environment. This is going to be a course  where we work in teams of four people on a project. This will be nice because I do not have such a course this semester.

I will keep you posted about how things go in Delft!

Hello all, Last week we had a little holiday in Delft. So that meant a week without lectures and time to catch up with some studying. I still have to do a project for a course named decision theory/expert judgment. We are doing a research concerning terrorism. We made a questionnaire with seed variables and our question of interest. By comparing the answers of the respondents with the actual data (which is only available to us), we can give every expert a weight. This weight is used in determining how much the opinion of each expert should weigh for the question of interest. Now we have all the data so we have to analyze it and write a report about it before Friday. 

Furthermore I did a two day course last week about first aid. For my student association it is important that there is always someone present who can give first aid. The first day of the course we learned about how to help people who get wounded. For example we learned how to resuscitate and how to use a defibrillator. We also learned how to put on bandages and how to put someone in a stable position. The second day was much more fun. We learned what to do in case of a fire. There was a special area, where the fire brigade normally also practices, and in this area they put on some fires that we had to extinguish. It was exciting to see what happens if you put the wrong extinguisher on a certain fire. For example putting water on burning metal gave huge explosions. It also showed me that it is really important to think about fire prevention because an entire room can burn down in less than two minutes.  

Since it was a holiday, there was also some time to have fun. On Wednesday night two of my friends performed in a ballet show. So with a couple of other friends we decided to see the show. The show was a new version of the very famous “swan lake”. I never go to dance performances or theatre so I didn’t really know what to expect beforehand. The show turned out to be really pretty and my friends performed very well. There was a choir and there were 24 dancers. Afterwards we waited for our friends to finish and went out to get some drinks. It was a really nice night out. Below I have put a photo of the performance.

Welcome back everyone! Here is another blog about my life as a Master student in Delft. Last week lectures started again for the second semester. I am now taking classes for my specialization, namely Financial Mathematics. The weeks before have been all about the exams. I had to take four written exams and I have two more oral exams to go. The written exams were a bit harder than expected so I have to wait for the results to see how I did.

Exam time is quite a special time in Delft. All the students are working very hard and everyone is concentrated. The university offers a lot of places to study and the library was packed. Therefore the library decided to expand the opening times. In the week before the exams and during the exams, the library was open from 8 o´clock in the morning till 2 o´clock at night. I also did a couple of long days of studying in the library and even at midnight it was still quite crowded. One time I met up with some international students in the library and we rented a closed study room in the library. Here we could study quietly but we could also discuss the subject with each other without bothering other students.

Lately winter has really started in the Netherlands. It has been really cold with at one point temperatures of a low of -22 degree. There has been a lot of snow and everyone has started ice skating. This is a very popular sport in the Netherlands and it has been busy on the ice. My building in Delft is built over a small pond that is also frozen. Last week there have been a couple of ice skating matches organized by the Sport and Culture Centre here. They offered hot beverages and you could rent skates. The forecasts are that the following days it will finally get a bit warmer and the ice will start to melt. This will be good for me because this semester I have to go the University of Utrecht once a week for a course offered by Mastermath. This is a collaboration of all Mathematics programs in the Netherlands that offer courses for Master students. So last Monday there were students from seven different Dutch Universities. Here below I have a picture of the ice underneath my apartment. They are preparing it for the skating matches.

Hi everyone,

Sorry for not writing any blogs in the last couple of weeks but I did not have a lot of news to tell you because I had a Christmas break for the last two weeks. It was nice to finally have some time off to relax and not having to work on any mathematics problems. Due to some deadlines I had to shorten the holiday by a couple of days but it was still very nice.

In the upcoming week we will have the last week of classes. Since this is the last lecture week, most professors will not discuss new material but we do have to hand in some last assignments. Currently I am working on a project for scientific computing where we use numerical methods to solve the convection-diffusion equation. There are a lot of methods to do this and even more preconditioners that can be used. I actually like this project since there is not a lot of theoretical work. Instead we program algorithms in Matlab and optimize these algorithms.

After this week of lectures we will have the so called “white week” also known as swotvac which is a week where you do not have any lectures and you can fully focus on studying for the exams. Then the two weeks after that will be filled with exams. I will have four written exams in these week and then two more oral exams in February. I still feel like I would not pass any of the exams if they were given right now so I will have a lot of studying to do in the upcoming weeks. Wish me luck!

Hi everyone!

The last couple of weeks I have been busy with studying and all sorts of other stuff. I am now officially moved into my new dorm, which is great. I have one roommate who also does the master program of Applied Mathematics. He bought a big whiteboard so now we can solve our homework problems like real mathematicians. The dorm is only a couple of hundred meters from the faculty so I can walk over there now.

Classes have been good lately. I still have to hand in a lot of assignments but I have all handed them in on time, and I think the results will be good. Last Wednesday I had an oral exam for the course Decision theory. A couple of weeks ago I also did the exam but it did not go so well, so I got another chance this week. This time the exam went much better and I got grade 7. There were a lot of theories I had to study about how to interpret subjective information to make an objective decision. Now all that is left for this course is one big project where we have to bring this theory into practice. This means that we have to find a problem for which we do not have sufficient data to solve it. We then need to make a questionnaire for experts and make a decision based on the outcomes of this questionnaire.

Furthermore I have to start looking for an internship to do next year. It is mandatory for every Mathematics student to do an internship of about two or three months so that we learn how to apply our mathematics skills in a non-mathematical environment. This means for example that you take an internship at an engineering company or a computer company. I would like to take an internship at a bank since my specialisation is finance. I would most prefer to do this internship overseas, but it would also be nice to do it at one of the big Dutch banks. I hope I can tell you more about it soon!

Hi! Today I will tell you a bit about the last couple of weeks and my life in Delft. Last week I got the key to my new apartment so I’ve been busy with painting and moving. Unfortunately this has taken up some study time but hopefully I can catch up next week. This week I have to assemble some furniture and move my last things and then I can start studying again. The apartment is about 300 meters from my faculty so that is really convenient.

Last week and this week have been kind of like a holiday. All other study programs have exams but since mathematics only has semester courses I do not have exams until January. However this still means that no classes are taught in these two weeks. Most professors think that because we do not have class that they can give us bigger assignments so I still cannot really relax but it is nice that I do not have to go the faculty every day.

Now I would like to tell you about a nice exercise that I solved today that could come to help for you in the future when you play this game. So imagine you have a fair coin and you let your opponent choose a sequence of three consecutive coin flips, for example HHH. Now you can choose another sequence of three coin flips that gives you a probability higher than 0.5 of getting your sequence before your opponents. If your opponent chooses the sequence HHH, we choose THH. This gives a probability of 7/8 of getting our sequence before our opponent. If the first three throws are not all heads than it is impossible for your opponent to win because if tails comes up than the next 3 throws have to be heads for your opponent to win but for you only 2 times so your sequence will always come up before your opponents.

Of course I have not only been studying for the last two weeks. Last Thursday I had a meeting with the Master coordinator, Rik Lopuhaa. He sent out an e-mail to all the students of the master to come to his office to talk about our study programs. Since I already know what I want to do, specialize in financial mathematics, it was not a very long conversation. Now I need to make a document with the courses I want to do and let my thesis supervisor sign it. Then I can send it to the exam committee to get approval. In the future I will have more contact with the Master coordinator because he can organize for students to do an internship during their study in Delft.

On Wednesday there was a special lunch lecture organized by the Mathematics and Computer Science Student Association. The lecture was given by Professor Bart de Smit from Leiden and he taught us about the so called Droste effect in Escher pictures. Let me explain what this is. The Droste effect is named after a special brand of coffee in Holland where the picture on the box is of a woman who holds the same box. So this can be seen as an infinite series of pictures in pictures. Escher is a Dutch painter famous for making paintings of impossible structures like a stairwell that keeps on going. There is one special painting that should also include the Droste effect but Escher left a white spot where this should occur. Bart de Smit studied this picture and through special calculations and computer programs he got to fill in the white spot. This was a great example of how mathematics can also be used in something so practical as art. That was it for the last weeks. In two weeks I will write another blog about my adventures in Delft….

Hi everybody! This is my first blog so let me start by introducing myself. My name is Toni Budimir and this year I started with my master Applied Mathematics, at Delft University of Technology. I live in Schiedam which is near Delft, but next month I will move to an apartment near the university. Before I started with the master, I already did my bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics at TU Delft.

Although the semester already started a couple of weeks ago, I will start by telling you about the introduction week we had. On the first Monday of  the semester, all the students of the Masters: Applied Mathematics, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering had to gather in our faculty EEMCS for the introduction week. Since I already did my bachelor’s degree in Delft, I saw a lot of familiar faces. Besides all the Dutch students that I already knew there were also a lot of new (international) faces. In the beginning everyone was quite shy and all nationalities formed little groups. Luckily this soon changed….

After everyone got his brochure for the week, we got on three buses which would bring us to a hostel in Arnhem (about 2 hours from Delft). Everyone got assigned to a room with people from different study programs and nationalities. In my room there were three Dutch students, a Greek student and a Romanian student. This was the first time that I got to talk to some international students and we immediately connected. It was actually really nice to learn about these other students and during the week I met more and more international students. This was aided by different games that we played and a project that we had to do together. At the end of the week the barriers between the different nationalities were pretty much broken and all sorts of new groups started to form. I think this week helped a lot of people to find their place in Delft and it helped me to meet a lot of new interesting people.

Bye, Toni!