misc

[cjqsg]

my term ends tomorrow. i am looking forward to it as i am getting quite sick of doing math and philosophy. i never thought i would say that but i've been doing too much work for the past few weeks. i dont stay up past 1am for work but i feel that i am losing the focus and drive for work.

i think i need a few weeks of doing nothing related to math

Comments

[chris_nysb]

Are these arguments in this essay ones that you came across in the literature, or are they things that you thought up yourself while examining his argument (or somewhere in between)? Do you like this essay because of its content or because of the way you framed the essay?

[cjqsg]

1. the main ideas of the arguments come from the texts that i read. some examples and comments are my own. i dont think i am in a position to come up with novel arguments myself yet.

2. this essay was the only one that isnt bad/average (and it is just 'good', not excellent or anything), largely because the essay plan and individual arguments were framed more clearly this time.

[yongzi]

Yeah I agree. Reading a paper takes alot of investment. Skimming through one either has no benefit or has the detriment of confusing you. I not sure about philosophy, but definitely for maths there should be review papers. Those should be rather accessible to us because they are meant to give an overarching view of topics instead of being too deep. You could try those.

[jez_hex]

> i think i need a few weeks of doing nothing related to math and philosophy

[cjqsg]

its lame bcos i dont know what the equations mean/are supposed to model and the whole point of them is to model particular phenomena. after all, the wave equation is not interesting in itslf. theorems in pure math have no such purpose. the ranknullity theorem is not about anything in the (physical) world, its just abt vector spaces.

not everything in applied math is immediately applied of cos. like we learn general methods of solving differential equations bcos we will need to solve differential eqns in all sorts of areas. im more okay with these sorts of things. but still, even now, we dont do these with any mathematical rigour atm. i guess we could, if we are interested, do these rigorously in further courses of real analysis though. another thing is i really dislike vectors. i hope i wont have to do divergence theorem and greens theorem and stuff like that in future courses.

[yongzi]

http://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/