Honey, I Finished The Internet

22 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

1. Gee thanks for the bedtime headache.

2. It is all Greek to me.

3. It reminds me of the undergrad linear algebra course I took during my sophomore undergrad year. It was bad enough that I had a hard time understanding the material, but the prof was mediocre and the textbook was terrible.

   Still, I managed to pass….

4. Quarternions are beyond complex. Give me something simpler.

5. Honey, I finished the Floppotron

6. Hm, it’s way beyond me. Perhaps I’ll ask our Prime Minister to explain it to me at the next town hall meeting.

7. don, I’m waiting for the unScientist !!!

8. I am ashamed to say, I had a nodding acquaintance in grad school with quartenions as an alternative way to look at quantum physics, a million years ago in a galaxy far, far away. I should have been more curious just from a mathematical point of view. But now the only thing that it sets spinning is my head.

9. There were far fewer leisure time distractions in the 19th Century. Freeing time for more … worthwhile endeavors

10. I’ve always been impressed by those who use mathematics to solve problems…and then there are those who invent their own math to figure stuff out. these people are scary. And few of us even know who they were and what they’ve done to shape our world.

11. “Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial position of the hour hand on the plane is multiplied by another constant number. But is a similar trick possible for describing rotations through space? Common sense says yes …”

    No , it doesn’t.

    Neither does the supposition.

12. It’s interesting to read about the physicists reactions to these new ideas. They go ape-shit. This is because science is a highly emotional discipline run by narcissists who spend their waking hours proving themselves right (the consensus) at the cost of others and refuse to hear contradictory ideas. This is why I wouldn’t let a scientist walk my dog – especially a climate scientist.

    1. One thing I noticed while I was a grad student was how many academics were egotists. Much of their time was spent in games of oneupmanship, such as by competing with each other as to who gets the bigger research grant, how many papers they published, or how many students they had working in their labs.

       Stuff like that made me glad that I never became a professor after I finished my doctorate. I saw enough of that nonsense in some of the companies I worked for while I was in industry.

    2. “Climate scientists” aren’t.

       You must live in constant terror. After all, aircraft are designed using physicists. The simulators used to train aircrew are simple applications of physics; and the computer graphics involved probably use quaternions.

13. “Math class is tough!” (Teen Talk Barbie voice.)

    1. Most of my undergrad math profs made sure it was and it didn’t have to be.

       I got the impression that they had utter contempt for anyone outside of their discipline, particularly engineering students. The one who taught our sophomore differential equations course was particularly bad for that. He seemed to sleepwalk his way through his lectures and often tried to be as obscure as possible just to show how much smarter than us he thought he was.

       1. I agree. Math doesn’t have to be hard. IMO, it’s all about the teacher. In high school (5 years of it, back then), I had the worst teachers every year. Except for one: a tiny Scottish woman who was the best math teacher I ever had. I finally got it! Unfortunately, after one month into the school year, she went on maternity leave and it was back to the awful teachers. I focused on History and English after that.

          1. My only math “success” was learning simple algebra in teachers college, 30 years after it had been completely hopeless. I was doing my elementary placement and got stuck teaching it in Grade7/8. Lo and behold, it was doable! Apparently one has to actually do the work and this time i did because I was scared stiff of messing up in front of the wolf pack.
             I did a competent job, under the watchful eye of my supervising teacher. Oh, and considerable help from a girl at the back who I called on when my mind blanked.
             Interesting side note – the teacher tried a goofy idea from OISE, but quickly stopped when it looked like it was screwing their heads up. And then went back to the basics.

14. Nineteenth-century math research was obsessed with finding things that had no practical use in the real world, but twentieth-century physics kept finding uses for exotic math, and the last remaining bastion of pure mathematics, number theory, fell to the forces of computer science decades ago.

    The bigger you go in math, the more you lose. You can pretty nearly always get an answer for an equation in real numbers, but once you go to the complex plane, a lot of the rules, like division, don’t work like they did in the simpler system. By the time you get to octonions, you can barely do anything. After that, you can do so little that mathematicians can’t even work out a mathematics for these objects that allows much more than adding and subtracting.

    1. Nineteenth-century math research was obsessed with finding things that had no practical use in the real world

       That’s not entirely true.

       Quite often, mathematical concepts are solutions in search of a problem. One practical use for mathematics during that era was demonstrated by James Clerk Maxwell. The equations he derived described electromagnetism.

       1. Funny that you would mention Maxwell — his famous equations for electromagnetism were originally expressed using quaternions, but nobody looks at them that way any longer. Nowadays, if you look up Maxwell’s Equations in a physics textbook you will see them expressed using either vectors or tensors.

15. my mathematical shining moment came in grade 11.
    the new teacher was, well, ‘all that and brains too’.
    I resolved to impress her the only way I could think of.
    it was the first year calculus was introduced, and despite my marks barely treading water up to that point, well they went from low 50s to high 80s in ONE term and stayed there.
    calculus.
    she allowed me to explain in understandable terms ie what I knew THEY were going thru, one of the exam Qs, that is,
    when the minute hand is exactly aligned with the hour hand closest to ‘5 minutes to 11’, where is the second hand?
    the trick was, because the minute hand is 5 minutes away from the 12 position, the hour hand will be a titch short of exactly on the 11.
    (thus you need to move the minute hand ‘back’ a bit, but in the process the hour hand moves ‘back’ 1/60th as much). a CLASSIC limits calculation.
    I described the approach I took to the solution, that 1 minute on the clock is exactly 360/60 = 6 degrees angle. etc etc.
    I couldnt do it now, but I still remember how proud I was my progress in that class.
    the lady had an unusual surname, so about 40 yrs later I googled it and sent a form letter to everyone who showed up and lo, she called me !!!
    howcum hb?
    I just wanted to thank you ma’am for showing me that if I did the WORK, I would get the RESULTS. which gave me the confidence to embark on my degree studies.
    howcum you waited this long?
    I needed to wait until the internet was invented to look you up !!

    we had a laugh about that. she taught for only 1 more year and went into IT, same as me.
    I found out in 2016 she passed away from cancer and I bawled my eyes out. I still think of her very fondly.
    and she told me her first name, Elaine.