I don't want to sound like a bigot

[james_davis_nicoll]

I'm really annoyed at how completely I've forgotten calculus.

Comments

[seawasp]

o_O;

How does forgetting calculus transform you into a bigot?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It doesn't. I said I didn't want to sound like a bigot so I did not then follow that up with something apparently designed with the specific intention of making it look like I dance around in white sheets. It's not rocket science.

"I don't want to set myself on fire" should be followed by something that doesn't involve setting myself on fire.

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a high school math teacher in training, it bothers me that calculus is held up as the pinnacle of math. You probably forgot it because it isn't relevant in your day-to-day life the way algebra and geometry and logic are.

Also speaking as a high school math teacher in training, is there something in particular that you'd like to be reminded of?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's the pinnacle of high school math, for many people, and the point where they finally crap out. That's just because of the vagaries of curriculum design.

The ones who go on are often undone by multivariable calculus in college (and they usually have no idea what one does with this stuff unless they're studying physics).

I've forgotten most of the esoteric techniques for doing integrals, and I don't care (that is what symbolic math software is for). The exception is integration by parts, because I had it drilled into my head in N dimensions doing quantum field theory.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

No, it's just that every once in a while I come across a problem that would be most easily solved with calculus and I can remember doing something similar in the past but not how I did it.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Bigot! Bigot!

I bailed out after the third semester of college-level math, matrix transformations and other such esoterica required for EE. Only thing I can remember out of all that is what an integral sign looks like.

(In my bigot's defense, I will say that my courses were further in the past than yours.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

He used to hang out with Tintin, didn't he?

[pmrabble.livejournal.com]

Hi fellow bigot!

Actually, it's been over 30 years since I studied any form of calculus. And within the last couple of weeks I've seen that I need to remember a whole lot of it in the next two years (network performance issues, FWIW). Wheee!!!!

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Today's xkcd reminded me of the bigotry of trig. Trigotry, if you will!

Chief Sohcahtoa weeps a single tear.

[sanguinity]

:: Chief Sohcahtoa weeps a single tear. ::

Ouch. I think I just threw my brain out. I'm blaming you.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I've never used that mnemonic[1] precisely because I'm just as likely to come up with the wrong syllables like in the strip[2]... so I got used to deriving it with the basic triangles and the curves whenever I forgot it.

[1] Actually, I forgot it even existed. It took me a while to figure out what the joke was.

[2] I'm the type of person that when I was told that "you can tell which hand is your left because when you hold it up it makes an L", I instinctively hold up both hands in the way that makes both have an L... because that's what I'm looking for.

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

Since xkcd does not have dates in its archive, for the benefit of future historians of James Nicoll I provide a link to said xkcd: Los Alamos.

[rfrancis]

In truth, I periodically go back and revisit my various math textbooks, whenever it annoys me that I've forgotten how to do most of what's in them. I never seem to make it as far as Diff Eq, though.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Differential equations was the moment when I realized that I couldn't just look at the equations and see the obvious connections anymore. I would have to do the homework not just to get the practice in, but to actually understand what was going on. It was my Humbling Moment.

My most recent humbling moment was when I realized I had forgotten the chain rule. Yeah, I hadn't done any calculus for quite a few years at that point.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Yep. No matter how hard the TAs tried, I could only get so far into Diff.Eq and partials until their voices went into "Charlie Brown's Teacher" mode. Maybe it was that concussion I had as a kid, or maybe I was born without the partial differentials region in my brain... but that was the point at which math (and my budding science/engineering career) stopped for me.

-- Steve's calculus has completely rusted solid now... can't even do simple derivatives anymore. *sigh*

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who has been known to take higher-level math classes for fun.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Calculus? Isn't that the stuff the dentist scrapes off your teeth twice a year?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too. (Math major in college, computer geek before and ever since. And I left college 33 years ago.)

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

"I don't want to sound like a bigot" gets me 2980 hits on Google. Yours is at the top. It is one of the rare examples that is not followed (immediately or not) by the word "but."

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

We should make a habit of emphasizing how much we don't want to sound like bigots. "I don't want to sound like a bigot, but do you know how late the library is open tonight?" "I don't want to sound like a bigot, but Jefferson City is the capital of Missouri."

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah. I took the prizes in both Grade 13 and first-year university calculus and I still would need a serious refresher to brush it up, to say nothing of the more serious analysis courses I took later (except for simple formulas like differentiating / integrating a polynomial expression).

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

It's sad, at one time I used to be able to do the full integration by parts for proving that a solid surfaced Dyson Sphere simply could not work. The whole 'no gravity outward to remain upon the inner surface and consequently fall into the center sun' thing. (it was a classical charged body proof taught to us in our EE course)

These days, I'm lucky to remember SOH-CAH-TOA without saying it out-loud.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Doing it coordinate by coordinate is the hard way anyway; the easy proof is to use Gauss's Theorem plus spherical symmetry. (But Gauss's Theorem is really just a very generalized statement about integration by parts.)

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Heh. I can't diagram sentences. Haven't had to do that for going on half a century.

[felila.livejournal.com]

It was only seven years ago that I revisited math, made it through two calculus courses, elementary statistics, and some discrete math, and it's all gone. I believe, as someone upthread said, that the statistics and combinatorics would be the most useful, if I still remembered anything of them.

And I never got to the point where Euler's Identity was just OBVIOUS, which was my goal.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

If you want that, you should go down the Pure Math route to Complex Analysis, which is Euler's Identity's natural home.

[liabrown]

I dropped out of HS math before even taking calculus. I was failing badly (had been diagnosed as learning disabled in math years earlier, for whatever that's worth), and none of the teachers were willing to help me. Thanks, education system!