Closet Cleanout

We're at my parents' house for the holidays; they are getting ready to move into a smaller house in Baltimore so my sister and I need to go through all the stuff in our childhood bedrooms and decide what to throw away and what to take back to our respective homes. My closet had all my binders and notebooks from high school and college, the vast majority of which are getting recycled, but I've been  flipping through them to look for things worth keeping. The high school work in particular reminds me of how extremely neurotic and bored I was at that time - for example, check out my math notebook:

Every speckle is colored in a different color, and outlined in pen - front and back, and even the sides are colored in rainbow. The inside is much the same:

The actual contents are page after page of meticulous notes, complete with color-coded section headers:

My favorite thing I've found from college so far is the page of quotes written down from my calculus professor, who was a very sweet old man who was also somewhat crazy. Highlights include:

• MIT has many strange rules, and one of them is that I'm not allowed to torture you any more than I do.
• ≈ is a sort of Saturday night equal sign, you're not quite sure what you're doing.
• There's nothing magical about the damn second derivative!
• It's complicated, so my advice is to use the arm-waving method to decide what's true.
• Mathematics is difficult to explain to someone who doesn't know any mathematics at all.
• We could solve this by bribing a friend, or an enemy, or by standard methods, or by writing down the answer.
• You won't need to know this til after Thanksgiving, and you'd better give thanks.
• So much for that problem, which I'll never assign again for as long as I teach this course.
• Greenspan wrote those problems, I don't know how the hell to do them.
• Any questions? This is pretty easy stuff, right? That was meant to stop you from asking questions.
• You don't believe me? You'll believe me when you're sitting there again next term.
• Mean Value Theorem - some are meaner than others.
• Lagrange was a very smart guy and now he's dead so we have to give him credit.
• The Jacobian is always lurking in the dark alley of calculus.
• Whether you remember it or not, Simpson is still dead.
• I don't want to test you on the intricacies of elementary calculus, but I might mistakenly. 
• I am available to take the test for anyone for the price of one million dollars. I will put on my teenage disguise.