Just one solution

Something seems to have happened to my brain. Something unfamiliar and unexpected but not unwelcome; something, in fact, rather wonderful. This something, whatever it is, has enabled me to solve a system of non-linear equations in eight variables. Correctly. Right first time. In only five pages. And to my amazement, it only had one solution.

I'm still in shock over this sudden ability to handle Lagrange problems, but I'm starting to think it is a very good thing indeed.

After a few more emails exchanged with Chris yesterday and today, I've also got the whole first half of the test all tidied up and expressed formally. That's the first three questions complete, leaving only eight marks still to do. I can't start on that last question yet - we haven't covered enough material in lectures. So sad.

Here is a pretty picture [the outcome of my checking-via-plot that I mentioned yesterday]:

The top one is cos(x)sech(y), with x and y both varying between -π and π. the bottom one is sin(x)sech(y) over the same range. Observe that the images of both are bounded between -1 and 1, which is the thing I needed to check.

This morning I received the following email from the Faculty of Commerce:

A design process is now going on for a proposed new undergraduate qualification at Victoria University, to be entitled the Bachelor of Economics and Finance... The new degree has been occasioned by a proposed reorientation of VUW’s existing Bachelor of Commerce and Administration (BCA) to become what is in effect a general management programme, concentrating on such things as organisational behaviour, and information and communications management.

The BEF will coexist with the BCA, as a programme for specialists in economics and finance. Many of the same topics will be covered but in a more analytical and instrumental fashion. But in addition, the new degree will allow the student degrees of freedom as to background depth in adjunct areas such as mathematics and statistics...

So now everyone's going to think I have some kind of dummy degree consisting of a "general management programme", and I will be in competition with all those bright young BEF graduates with their "analytical and instrumental" education. It's enough to make a girl contemplate a change of career...