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Friday, August 10, 2007

All through the night it's a celebration

I only worked until midnight, but that was sufficient to write up questions 1-5 and have a small inspiration over question 6. The inspiration developed this morning [largely due to me noticing I was meant to be finding the derivative in question at 0, not in general], and verily the beast was slain, sort of. Question 8 ended up being a little strange and [consequently] I couldn't do the proof of question 9 in general, but the rest was more or less fine.

In the lecture we started on ordinary differential equations, which we will apparently just "scratch the surface" of. The section on Lagrange multipliers ended up being almost alarmingly short, and most of it was unfamiliar in notation. I assume it was effectively an extension of what was covered in second year, but I won't know for sure until I look at the notes more closely.

The more math I do, the more I become a grumpy old fogey. I have less and less patience for people who don't take mathematics seriously. Not that I expect everyone to have the time and energy that I have to devote to this course, but if you're taking the course in the first place, you may as well make some effort to actually do the assignments. This morning I was rather rude about someone who hadn't yet started the assignment, in front of that person's friend. This is probably not a good way to make friends in my classes, but oh well - people with that attitude won't last long anyway.

There I go again.

Math doesn't let me rest and it doesn't let me slack off. In most other intellectual pursuits I've experienced, I've been able to do fairly well with no effort and very well with a little effort. Mathematics doesn't let me get away with that sort of thing, so right now, it's the only thing I have any respect for.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

One Vision!

Bruce Hoult said...

you gotta be quick around here!

Gael said...

Er, yes. Certain people may have a certain unfair advantage when I'm blogging from their laptop ;)

Star for you, certain one.

Bruce Hoult said...

mmm ... shiny

Unknown said...

The thing that really killed MATH for me was second year, where I actually had to put effort into it, and I took too many courses, rendering available MATH time more limited than I'd have liked. Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if I'd been a bit more dedicated to my MATH papers that year.

But then there are so many past events or non-events that fit into that potentially life-changing category that worrying about them seems somewhat pointless.

Gael said...

So knowing retrospectively that things do turn out okay still doesn't rid us of crippling self-doubt and self-recrimination? Darn.

Unknown said...

Wouldn't call it crippling. I think I'm too busy to have time to worry these days :-)

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