Do you know how humiliating it is to not undertsand what others speak to you? Especially, when you pride yourself to be fluent technically, and you are unable to understand them? Don't you often crave suicide?
For that is what happened to me recently. I was in class one day, and the class was going just fine, until, the professor insisted that the stress tensor was deviatoric, and that some other tensor ( I forget which) was anti-symmetric, and that a system of non-linear points had either saddle points or fixed points and that some were attractors. And there was something to do with invariants of second order tensors too.
I also writhe in shame when I see central limit theorem of calculus be used (as it is used often in Mechanics). If you're talking about the poles of an expression, I would look for the polar bears. I fear imaginary numbers like the average man would fear an agressive canine. Though I am comfortable with the Gauss and the Stokes theorems, I am petrified of Parseval's theorem, of Ricatti Equations, of variational calculus, of topology, of Banach Spaces, (and even Hilbert Spaces, for that matter). I still cannot recall the binomial expansion of (1-x)^n.
Mathematics has been a subject that I have not been paying attention to all my life. I believe the neglect has become quite criminal now. But, thankfully, I am still a student. I can still set things right. I have a chance to improve myself from the mechanic who knows only how to use screw drivers, to a mehcanic who knows how to use pnueumatic and hydraulic tools. Lots of interesting courses abound in the courses.tamu.edu website. I should take at least four math courses, to set some damage right.
For that is what happened to me recently. I was in class one day, and the class was going just fine, until, the professor insisted that the stress tensor was deviatoric, and that some other tensor ( I forget which) was anti-symmetric, and that a system of non-linear points had either saddle points or fixed points and that some were attractors. And there was something to do with invariants of second order tensors too.
I also writhe in shame when I see central limit theorem of calculus be used (as it is used often in Mechanics). If you're talking about the poles of an expression, I would look for the polar bears. I fear imaginary numbers like the average man would fear an agressive canine. Though I am comfortable with the Gauss and the Stokes theorems, I am petrified of Parseval's theorem, of Ricatti Equations, of variational calculus, of topology, of Banach Spaces, (and even Hilbert Spaces, for that matter). I still cannot recall the binomial expansion of (1-x)^n.
Mathematics has been a subject that I have not been paying attention to all my life. I believe the neglect has become quite criminal now. But, thankfully, I am still a student. I can still set things right. I have a chance to improve myself from the mechanic who knows only how to use screw drivers, to a mehcanic who knows how to use pnueumatic and hydraulic tools. Lots of interesting courses abound in the courses.tamu.edu website. I should take at least four math courses, to set some damage right.
No comments:
Post a Comment