A Quick Lecture Run-Down

Before I came to university, I had a notion that lectures were going to be awkward to get through. You'd have to take notes all the time while following the lecturer and I thought it would be impossible to keep up at all.

My mind was as wrong as your everyday internet troll. It hadn't even taken into account the existence of whiteboards - it only thought about projector screens which didn't have anything on them to aid understanding, and having to write all the undecipherable equations down, making it difficult to listen. (And in fairness to past me, my ears do tend to turn off when I'm copying off of the whiteboard, but whiteboard writing stays up longer and needs rubbing off sometimes. And I can actually understand what I'm writing too)

Real lectures are hardly like that at all. In fact, plenty of lecturers just hand you the flipping notes. You just have to keep up with what's going on and maybe annotate bits of information as you go through it all. Maybe you'll end up going right back to the beginning and learn where techniques come from in the first place, maybe you're picking up on all this new stuff with new symbols and methods, or maybe your lecturer will try and bribe a graph of x² (with money) to give a value for x where y = -1 to demonstrate that there is no real answer for it. It's good to have a sense of humor when half of what you're covering is known by half the lecture hall.

Even the more 'note'-worthy lecturers are pretty cool. (And I have noted that pun as one of the worst puns I have ever made up. I apologize for this and the notation around the word 'note'. A Minim sure likes a pun about 'notes.' It's terrible) And at least one of them puts all of his notes online where you can find them. Taking notes is a good thing that you can do with your hands, and copying stuff can be a good way to learn things, too. Maybe you're revisiting the definition of an angle (proper angles work in radians here, because if you draw a circle of radius 1 around the point, the angle between the two lines would just be the length of the arc between them). Maybe you're playing around with new terms.

Of course, the most on-hands module has the most on-hands approach, with the lectures just being used to tackle some of the most common problems that people were coming up with, while much of the learning is done by going through and doing stuff and just simply asking about it. Maybe simply asking about things isn't in a Minim's nature, but doing the work and using the resources available is, and so this means that a Minim is very satisfied.

Notation

There is something that is bugging me about notation in Maths.

You see, these are all fine:

But I really don't get this:

Maybe integers made the mathematicians sleep?

25-5

Recently this question was posed to me:

How many times can you subtract 5 from 25?

 The supposed answer is once, because then you'd only have 20.

I see it differently. It's a calculation, and you can do the same calculation over and over again forever, if you wish. With an infinite amount of time and resources, you could do the problem forever indefinitely.

Let's consider something more realistic. If you were to do that calculation all day and night, without doing anything else, for the rest of your life, you would die in 3 days because you haven't had any fluid intake. If the calculation takes 2 seconds each time, you could do it 30 times in a minute, 1,800 times an hour, and 43,200 times in an entire day. So, in three days, you would do the calculation 129,600 times. Not too shabby.

Let's cut in time to eat and drink and sleep and survive. Let's assume that survival to a ripe old age means you have to spend 11 hours a day on it. That leaves 13 hours a day for calculating. In one day, this would be 23,400 times. And as life expectancy in the UK is about 80 years, if you did the calculation every day of your life, accounting for survival, you would do the calculation 683,280,000 times. That's quite a lot and it doesn't account for leap years, either, so it's slightly larger than that (or you decided to have a break every February 29th)

That's about how many times you could do the calculation.

Fun, isn't it?

Maths: An Analysis

"But Maths is so haaaaard. Why are you doing this? I can't do Maths!"

That is where you are wrong, my friend. Maths isn't hard, and you can do it!

So what is Maths, anyway? First, it's knowing how to deal with a certain problem. I bet you know how to deal with this following problem:

See, you can do Maths! Even you, girl who declared she couldn't do it a lot in form when I was sitting next to you. Well done. Have a biscuit.

Secondly, it's knowing when to apply what you know, and knowing when not to apply it. The first and only step you did there was to re-arrange the numbers to get x=8.

But that won't work as a first step with

Here, you have to do something different. Add the two equations and you get 2x=34, so x=17. Then you substitute that value in one of the equations to get y=3. Or you could have subtracted them and got to the same ends.

Easy, right?

Maths: Basic knowledge, then expanding and developing that knowledge. SOH CAH TOA? The chocolate sprinkles on top of the froth on top of the trigonometry coffee. And you can blame one of my Maths teachers for that one.

Maths gives us charts:

That's how I spend my time.

Never say you can't do Maths. Anyone can do Maths.

"What's the point of Maths?"

It's the backbone of Science. You can have several equations that are simultaneous to fly aircraft. Well, 6.