Over the past year or so, my interest in math has gone up, even though my marks have shot down. If I weren’t a computery person, I’d probably have gone into math at Waterloo. I mean, from all of the OAC textbooks I’ve been reading, I think I would have liked the OAC Algebra and Geometry and Calculus courses.

Yes, algeo is hard. Or, at least, the very beginning of the year with proofs and stuff was hard. Things really picked up once we hit vectors. I really enjoyed the course from chapters four to eight for the most part. The next part, the discrete math part, looks really interesting too, and I’m going to have a look at the stuff we didn’t do in the OAC book.

Calculus is also quite interesting. We started out with stupid stuff that’s very common in the new curriculum like different ways to model a function. They wasted an entire chapter on that and it was so bloody obvious. Once we got to real calculus and hit derivatives, I really began to understand how and what calculus worked and was used for, which is key to adding enjoyment in something you’re learning.

In both of the courses, I’ve flipped through both our textbooks and the OAC one and I’d come across things that I had no idea what they meant or what they did. The first time I saw a matrix, it was a wtf moment. But, I waited in anticipation when we’d learn what that thing did.

Same for exponential functions. I knew e had some sort of significance. What in bloody hell was a natural log? How do you use logs?

And then there’s the graphing calculator thing. Whenever we use them in calc, which has been quite often recently, I always end up playing around with them and my calculator using skills increase after every class. I keep on finding shortcuts and different ways to solve things on them. In fact, I even found out how to do matrices and row reduced echelon form on them and I was so happy. Shortly after, I realized that we could’ve used them on the algeo exam.

For the calculus ISU, we had to find several properties of a function that we were given. I typed it out in TeX and printed it on my laser printer. It looks so amazingly neat and pretty. I spent a few minutes after getting it back to see how amazing the equations looked all spaced out properly and drawn crisp and clear. Radicals, primes, big brackets, fractions, all etched out to perfection on paper.

Unlike physics or chem, I actually like learning about derviatives and vectors. I didn’t like the labs and randomness that came with chem. There were too many rules with too many exceptions. It wasn’t abstract enough to hold as much interest as math does now.

Before Grade 12, math was just lines and systems of equations and basic arithmetic and plain old boring stuff. Grade 12 math was actually more applicable to other situations than previous grades. Vectors and calculus just keep on popping up in the sciences.

So for the past while, I’ve been thinking seriously about switching programs to CS. The reasons were many: less work, less time in class, more electives, more math, less science. In the end, I decided not to, just because of the effort that I’d have to exert. Heck, I found out even later that I could have had so many options in that program, what with the different majors and options that the B.Math degree has.

I have so much fun talking about ? and e and derivatives and planes. When I read on one of my friends’ LiveJournals about this equation that they learned about at university, I was amazed by it and I didn’t really know why. Apparently, it’s one of the greatest equations ever.

e^i?+1 = 0

The equation is called Euler’s Identity. It ties together ? (3.14159…), e (the base of natural logarithms), i (the imaginary number, the root of -1), 1, and zero.

If it were still December, I’d so be a mathie right now.

Tags: Life, math, School, Waterloo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Life, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.