Then it ain't so groovy

The best thing about today was getting assignment 1 back. I got 18.5 out of 20 - the highest mark I've had on a math assignment this year, and certainly higher than anything I'll get in the rest of the course. The mark written on the front of the assignment was actually 19 out of 20, but that's not what the numbers inside add up to. I didn't bother pointing out the discrepancy to Chris - due to the way the course is assessed, the actual value of the mark is totally irrelevant so long as it's over 50%. Every assignment mark over 50% gets me 1% of my total grade. It's a very sympathetic assessment structure.

Today there was a lecture and a tutorial. In the tutorial Chris demonstrated how to prove that something is or is not differentiable, which will be useful for the last two assignment questions. In the lecture I fell asleep, I'm sure of it. Somehow this left me with two solid pages of notes, most of which involve proving that n-dimensional calculus works just the same as one-dimensional calculus. It's all very reassuring really.

And I could use some reassurance right now - I'm halfway through both assignments and have about four hours free before they're due. This morning I had a small inspiration about question 6, but it wasn't sufficient to actually finish solving the problem. I'm in despair over question 3, trying to pretend that question 4 isn't happening, haven't started questions 9 or 10 [which both deal with differentiability].

Question 8 is done, though. It was lovely.