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Monday, August 13, 2007

Caught in a landslide

After spending the entire morning crunching data for QUAN, I drowsed through a math lecture on differential equations [in the one lecture we had six definitions and nothing else] and then discovered that I've completely forgotten how to use Lagrange multipliers. As the last seven questions of assignment 5 are all about Lagrange multipliers, this is proving to be a problem.

It's not really that I don't know how to use Lagrange - the principle is simple enough - but that the algebra has me rather stumped at present. I've made a mistake somewhere and my rustiness with this technique means that I don't even know where to start looking for it. Currently I'm using Maple to give me a hand up, and hopefully I'll get back up to speed before too long.

During the lecture Chris had a small rant about the word "homogeneous". I recall being very surprised when I first heard this word in first year - I'd always assumed it was "homogenous", pronounced much like "homogenised", as in milk. According to Chris, only biologists have any use for such a word as "homogenous". This doesn't prevent me from using it to shorten pronunciation, although I do mostly remember to spell it with the extra "e" now. It's very important to try to speak the same language as one's lecturers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too much spare time?

Bohemian Rhapsody!

Gael said...

What's that supposed to mean, star boy?

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