[HN Gopher] A Mathematical Trivium (1991) [pdf]
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A Mathematical Trivium (1991) [pdf]
Author : cesarosum
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-04-08 12:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (physics.montana.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (physics.montana.edu)
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Very enjoyable! I started working a few problems in my head, and
| realized I'd run out of scratch ram quickly.
|
| I especially liked his points on examination, what we call the
| "orals" in Physics. There, the (in his words, defenseless)
| student is up in front of a board, while professors throw
| problems at them. I had a few good questions on mine, and one
| which was ... poorly specified. I remember thinking I simply had
| to crank on that problem, showing my thinking processes to try to
| answer the question. At the end, the prof nodded, pointed to
| something before my conclusion, and said "that was as far as I
| got."
|
| I remember feeling relieved yet angry. Just smiled, nodded,
| thanked him for the question, and moved on.
|
| Talk about an imbalanced power dynamic.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Seems pretty reasonable to me. If you look at these questions and
| learn how to do them, you'll have learned a fair bit. It's not
| like you can learn by rote all the transformations you'll need to
| answer these, you're better off just learning the theory.
|
| I would have loved to have a simple 100 known-but-non-trivial
| questions like this. You avoid the lottery of having to remember
| some particular detail (say some integral that appears in some
| derivation that an adhoc question might contain), but you don't
| avoid having to actually know how the theory works, because it's
| a little bit too hard to memorize.
|
| Admittedly you might still get stuck on a trivial step but at
| least you've had a chance to go over the questions, and it might
| be relatively fresh.
| enriquto wrote:
| The limit in question 2 is wickedly difficult to solve by
| traditional means. You have to apply l'Hopital rule about seven
| times, and it becomes a monster formula. Or, you expand
| everything by Taylor up to order eight. In any case, the
| computation fills several pages. There must surely be a
| geometrical reasoning to compute that limit.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| https://mathoverflow.net/questions/20696/a-question-regardin...
| Koshkin wrote:
| I like the (possibly, older) style of the integral sign that
| appears in this paper better than how it is usually typeset these
| days.
| mixedmath wrote:
| I've heard these called the German or Russian style integral
| sign. I don't know the actual history. I have seen this
| question [1] on the tex/latex stackexchange about making this
| integral sign.
|
| I would expect a journal to not use a different font integral
| sign, however. Or rather, I would expect the "house style" to
| include font choices for integral signs as well. I'm not aware
| of any journal that uses this type of integral now, but I
| suppose I should also note that I mostly read papers from the
| arxiv now anyway.
|
| [1]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/170028/integral-
| sign...
| randomopining wrote:
| Trivium - Throes of Perdition
| ryan93 wrote:
| What percentage of MIT grads could answer even half of these.
| Pretty hardcore questions it seems.
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