Typical college students have seen some Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) in their calculus class, perhaps just briefly because the curriculum is already jam packed. Typically a student is considered "had calculus" if he or she can take a derivative of a function and do some integration. How much of that knowledge is retained after a few years may perhaps be modeled using an exponential decay. (Now that's an application of a differential equation!)
I admit I forgot all my diff equations. These are simply not used often enough nor basic enough to retain in my memory. No, I am not going to put much effort in recalling this lost memory either, because I don't find much use of it now.
One day I was challenged: tell me ONE use of calculus, tell me ONE use of trigonometry. My answer: how do you think current technology is possible if everyone only know how to do 4 basic operations, (although I can't pinpoint exactly where that integral or derivative is needed)
On CTA, one day I saw a lady in 30s or 40s reading a photo-copied LaTex-written packet about differential equations. This looks like a professor-written unpublished book.
It's got a lot of matrices and perhaps involving some eigenvalues.
Not sure what class from what school is that lady taking. She definitely does not look like the age of a typical college student who are forced to take some requirement classes.
Yes, you can still continue to learn any subject (including math) even if your age is beyond the interval of [18..22]!
2 comments:
I am very impressed knowing that Kin On's wife, Amy almost finishing her degree in accounting. Her song is getting the same degree next year. She was a computer science major used to work in Lucent.
I guess life can be simple if we choose to live a simple one. Calculus is used when we ask questions like why the area of a circle is pi*r*r. Note that the formula just uses one of the four basic operations, and we learn this formula in elementary school. Of coz, we can choose to ignore the reasoning and get an A on an exam :)
In class I ask why mercury is liquid, as it's not taught. The elements around it are all solids. It's the only metal that is in liquid state in r.t.
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