I don't want to sound like a bigot

[james_davis_nicoll]

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

Comments

[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.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Speaking of integration by parts, that reminds me of the afternoon that I taught my roommate calculus.

He was a brilliant CS major being put through college by his employer, in his last semester, who needed one final math credit to graduate and was in serious danger of flunking calculus. I knew the guy was way too smart and too quantitatively adept to be flunking calculus, so I figured I'd use the same technique I'd used when I picked up some extra bucks tutoring flailing math students in high school, and just have him do some homework problems while I watched over his shoulder.

What often happens with struggling math students is that they'll have crises of confidence, where (perhaps because they made trivial mistakes in the past) they just freeze up when they're on what is essentially the right path, and they can do much better with some encouragement. Miraculous-seeming results can be achieved.

In his case, one thing that was giving him a lot of trouble was integration by parts. And it turned out his problem was that he was trying to do almost all of it in his head. Every so often, he'd start to write down some intermediate steps in his work, and he'd apologize. I told him, look, I can't ever do these integration-by-parts problems myself without writing down what I think is u and dv, and then writing down the consequent v and du, and then plugging them all into the formula on paper. If I can't do it, someone who is having trouble with the homework assignments probably shouldn't be doing it. And by drilling him over and over to write down all the steps in his work, I got him through that, and through all the other stuff too, and he easily passed the course.

So he taught me to ski.

[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*

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The worst thing Condorcet ever did was to invent the curly ∂ symbol for a partial derivative. We could probably have gotten by with just regular ds there, and it confuses math students everywhere by making them think there's something special about partial derivatives that they're missing. It's like the emperor's new clothes.

It does look smart when you draw a slash through it Feynman style.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

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