Tropers that do NOT hate math

(Edit: I'm ashamed of what I originally wrote in this post, please ignore.)

edited 27th Feb '15 11:56:00 PM by Pyrarson

I once heard an analogy (I don't know who it was from) between math and painting, specifically describing the way math is taught in schools. Imagine you went to a painting course, and instead of painting beautiful works of art, you just painted walls. You would go your whole life thinking that that was all painting was, and you would hate it, because it's tedious and boring. This is kind of like how we teach math in schools. We never teach any of the interesting things until University.

It's from Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament

I like maths too! Has anyone here qualified for a national maths Olympiad? If so, do tell me which books I should use.

Perhaps you fine folks can help me find a calculation tool. I am looking for a calculator or tool that can calculate energy required to accelerate a mass from 0 to its top speed.

That depends on if you care about relativistic effects (top speed near the speed of light).

Classically, the energy required to move at a speed v is

K = (1/2)m v^2,

where K is kinetic energy and m is mass.

Relativistically, the energy required is

K = (g - 1)m c^2,

where c is the speed of light and g is the relativistic gamma which is given by

g = 1/sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2).

Note that for v << c (v is much smaller than c), these give indistinguishable answers.

I don't need anything for calculating relativistic speeds just something fairly simple.

K = (1/2)*m*v^2,

That will work just fine. Thanks.

I love math so much that I regularly include it (and science in general) in my lemon stories. (Cue helpless Willow and were-Oz, momentarily unsure whether he should devour her or have sex with her, and narrators comment: clearly nonabelian actions.) Try to out-nerd THAT!

If you were truly nerdy, you'd write a harem story in which the protagonist gets it on while pondering something equivalent to the axiom of choice.

A Zorn's Lemon, if you will.

While I do agree math is complicated. I actually enjoy it because it so soothing trying to find x, solve that equation, doing the math. I too get tired of the "I hate math", I don't see why people don't try to do it. It's better than English because math is logical and you can to the answer through a logical path, but english is like subjective with "the sky being the limit".

Mathematics also has a strong aesthetic component to it, though. There are often many possible answers, and which is the "best" can depend on context and subjective preferences.

(Logical correctness is only the bare minimum — one can answer a question in a way that's technically correct, but provides no insight, is unnecessarily convoluted, or lacks generality. On the other end, informal reasoning and intuition can be quite valuable despite lack of rigor.)

Math is my shakiest subject, but I still enjoy it. (Note: In my case, "shakiest subject" means "the only one that I count on falling to "C" during the school-year".)

Maths is the subject I'm best at- I'm 12 and do year 10 maths.

Currently studying Applied Mathematics in College @_@

I took year 10 extension maths this year (year 9), and they're gonna figure out some way to have me do year 11 maths next year even though that couldn't happen this year because it wouldn't give me scholarship points or something

... I have no idea what that means @_@ Congrats, tho :P

Me and Math here have an unrequited relationship. Mostly on my side.

I got to show off my calculus knowledge in my Physics class the other day. The class is primarily algebra-based, but right now we're looking at one-dimensional motion, i.e., things moving in a straight line, and one of the questions on a homework assignment was "What is the relationship between the graph of position over time and the graph of velocity over time?" and then an identical question re: velocity and acceleration.

And the answer they wanted was "The slope of the graph of position at any value of X is equal to the Y-value of the graph of velocity for the same value of X." And the same relationship applies from velocity to acceleration, because velocity is a rate of change of position, and acceleration is a rate of change of velocity. What's that, you say? Rate of change? That sounds like calculus!

As any caluclus nerd will tell you, that is basically a less mathy way of saying "The first derivative of the position-over-time function is the velocity-over-time function." And similarly, the first derivative of the velocity-over-time function (e.g., the second derivative of the position-over-time function) is the acceleration-over-time function.

So I explained all of that in the homework because I can't resist an opportunity to show off knowing more about a class than I'm supposed to know. :p

edited 11th Oct '16 11:40:37 AM by SolipSchism

Is that one of those physics classes that pretends it doesn't use calculus? Those strike me as kind of ridiculous — you can't really do physics without calculus, so they always end up doing calculus anyway and just hiding it behind vague phrases, handwaving, and half-explanations so it's less obvious that it's actually calculus. Sounds like you've found where the calculus was hiding.

So far, yeah. I suspect there will be more calculus. Or at least, more opportunities to use calculus where it's not expected.

I know how that feels. I decided to take a Physics class this semester, and in this first half of the course I've already studied basically everything they taught us.

Okay, it's true I had this one teacher who demands a lot of crazy stuff, including some things I'm also studying in the other classes I'm taking right now, but still.

However only now I actually learned about work and energy I understand that one exercise he took out of nowhere in one of his weekly tests (and also in the final exam). It was something about the integral of some functions K and U (kinectic energy and potential energy). I did it thoughtlessly because I just had to integrate, derivate and do algebraic manipulations. But now I know what that was about! ... Even if that teacher said he "doesn't believe in energy"

Integrals are fun. Although the "+C" thing irritates me. I'm always annoyed by those things in math that are virtually always present and yet almost totally irrelevant to the math itself, like integral constants or units in physics.

Like, as long as you make sure you're using the right units, is it really necessary to actually write "m/s²" for every step of the process?

Spoiler alert: No. No it's not. I'll just write it at the end, with my answer for the value of acceleration, where it actually matters. <_<

edited 12th Oct '16 7:58:04 AM by SolipSchism

The "+C" thing is a big mess in many widely used (and badly written) calculus textbooks. Many of these books systematically confuse indefinite integrals (which are functions given by definite integrals with the input to the function serving as the upper bound) with antiderivatives; all indefinite integrals are antiderivatives when working with a continuous function on an interval (which is part of the fundamental theorem of calculus), but this is false in general — indefinite integrals of discontinuous functions might not be differentiable at all, but also only make sense when the domain is connected and the function is integrable on every interval in the domain. (And even for some very simple functions, not all antiderivatives arise as indefinite integrals.)

Plus, for antiderivatives on a disconnected domain, the difference between any two antiderivatives can be any locally constant function — i.e., it's constant on every interval, but can take different values on different connected components of the domain — and many textbooks fail to mention this at all, giving a supposed "general form" that omits many antiderivatives.

It's really too bad, because this is actually an important point for understanding how integration works and how it relates to differentiation.