Week Two

This week I had the chance to go out and explore not only Medford, but Cambridge and Boston. I went with a group of Leadership Alliance students, that are also at Tufts University for the summer on a expedition to explore the city and learn how to ride the train, which is called the T. I visited Davis Square which is a 10 minute walk from my apartment. Davis Square has numerous restaurants and shop. Since it is summer time Davis Square was pretty quiet and relaxed. We caught the T in Davis Square and went down two stops to Harvard Square, which was full of commotion.

While at Harvard Square we visited Harvard's campus and walked around the Square. There are a lot of artist and street performers in Harvard Square. We had lunch at a place called Flat Patties in Harvard Square, which had good burgers and friendly service.

Our next stop was Newbury Street which required a switch from the red line to the green line. The green line of the T is was very crowded. Newbury street was fun, there are tons of places to shop and the buildings are amazing to look at. We walked all the way down Newbury street which leads to Boston Commons. Boston Commons is a big area in the middle of the city that consist of parks, ponds, fountains, flowers, and fields. Walking through the commons you will see all types of people and tons of entertainment. There are people playing all kinds of music and lots of other types of artist.

While in the heart of boston we had the chance to walk around and see all the places to go during the weekend. We went by the local theatre, nightclubs, and duck boat tours. A duck boat tour is a tour of the city, first through the streets then through the water of Charles river. I plan at some point in the summer to take one of the duck boat tours. To end our tour of the city we visited Chinatown. There were so many restaurants in Chinatown I don.t think I could ever eat at them all.

For my lunch meeting this week we had Peruvian food. This was my first time having Peruvian and I loved it. We had fried plantains, fried yuca, charcoal chicken, Tacu Tacu, sweet potatoes, and salad. It was catered by Machu Picchu a restaurant in Somerville.

Reading group this week was fun. We read three papers, all of which my mentor was a co-author of. The papers were Compatible Geometric Matchings, Disjoint Compatible Geometric Matching, and Bichromatic Compatible Matching. During our reading group meeting my mentor gave a talk covering all the topics in the papers. Outside of reading group this week I have been trying to learn all I can about Cellular Automata in relation to the Game of Life. I have found a list of open problems and have been looking into which ones are still open and would be ideal to try and complete. I have started reading sections of Game of LIfe Cellular Automata by Andrew Adamatzky and works by Stephen Silver. I have been looking into patterns that have quadratic growth and patterns that have spiral growth. I am hoping to be more familiar with cellular automata by next week so I can start working on open problems.