Cranberry-Lemon mathematics grad student Jane Simmons is a proud mother of a brand new graph. Despite her doctor and advisor’s due date of six months ago, it took Jane 9 months of labor and gestation to birth the new graph.
“It took a lot of work, hours of devouring papers, and even more labor pushing out R code to create this beautiful graph,” comments an exhausted Jane Simmons at the end of her weekly committee meeting. “I’ve never been as hungry for math papers as I was creating him. Especially towards the end. I always had something in front of my face looking for the reason my code wasn’t working. This graph is my whole world and I’m never letting it out of my sight.”
The insemination of the graph began when Jane’s advisor Dr. Jacobs had an idea 9 months ago. After a loud and passionate night of diagraming and brain storming on a white board in his office, Jane was seeded the idea of developing a method for fitting a single layer feed forward neural network with an unknown link function. The single zygote idea then kept multiplying and growing through hours and hours of online lectures and late night research.
Implanted with the thesis topic, Jane got to work on the novel research. “The first and second tri-semester of the graph gestation period wasn’t too hard on Jane,” Dr. Jacobs commented. “But things started getting rough when the third tri-semester started. That’s when I kept hearing moaning and groaning coming from Jane’s high performance computer she used to run simulations and test her code. She would only stop to emerge for more papers or help with her code when things started to break or her Fourier like basis functions weren’t modeling the simulated link function correctly.”
Many many Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations feeding into approximate Bayesian methods later and Dr. Jacobs began to hear tears of joy come from the computer lab. Jane had found the missing comma in her R code and Beautiful graphs were springing up across the monitor modeling all sorts of hyper parametrized data with any number of data distributions.
“You could really tell those graphs took after their parents,” one committee member commented. “The axes and colors were Dr. Jacob’s preferred style and the plot legend and line width was what Jane used on her statistical inference homework.”
The graphs are now growing up and are being further matured under the watchful caring eyes of Jane. “Having the power to create beautiful graphs of a novel method is a wonderful feeling. For the first time in my life, I really feel like an academic,” Jane said. “I think next time I will use more open source libraries. Dr. Jacob said doing everything from scratch would be a more natural and rewarding experience but that pain was just not worth it.”
Jane is now raising the graphs into a full thesis and journal article ready for publication. We expect to see them out in the world as soon as Jane’s committee is done arguing about the formatting.
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