Does anyone else here actually enjoy math? Most people I know find it boring and pointless. I don't mean you have to get super excited at the prospect of doing 100 homework problems, I'm talking about finding the various mathematical concepts interesting. Or getting a nice sense of accomplishment when you figure out tricky problem. For me, math is the only subject that I try in, even when I don't really need to. This thread is about math in general, becuae I realize that most people on here aren't going to have the same backround. BTW, I am in AP Calc AB (that's the first year of advanced calculus for those who use a different system).
Uh-huh.....any Asians here? I used to get full marks when I was little without studying, now it's killing me.
Horror stories about trigonomerty (Addition Formula, Factor Formula, R-Formula), logarithmns, calculus for half a year(soon to be) before I hit 16 mehe. Half a year of splendid algebra when I was 13.
But yeah I do get satisfaction from it. But then I get close to dead before that. Two and a half hour math papers.
Plus a third of the class are China scholars who are at least two years older. The ones who teach the teacher that his indices equation were totally wrong.
I'm only in high school and a lot of the subtopics I find very dislikeable. It seems that to justify your answer you'll need to learn more algebra, or more statistics, or getting faster at analysing groups of numbers and look for sequences, and it's like this endless chain of learning to justify the previous answer, which makes me a bit fed up. :| However, I do get a kind of thrill when I realise that I can successfully expand brackets . . . Using my totally awesome yet impaired mathematically skills.
Where on earth are you ever going to use calculus?
Okay, Here's a practical, everyday example for why you need to know calculus.
Say you're shopping at the mall, when you notice that the hamsters in the pet store are breeding like crazy, at a rate of f(t) = t * e^(t^2), where t is time in seconds and f(t) is hamsters per second. Your father is the manager of the store, so you know that the shop has a maximum capacity of exactly one million hamsters. You need to figure out how much time you have to evacuate the store before it reaches maximum hamster capacity and explodes. So what do you do? You use calculus (hopefully you brought your calculator shopping)! First, you need to find the integral (we'll call it g(x) because I can't make an integral symbol) of the rate, which would be g(x) = (e^(t^2))/2 + c (in this case the "c" is irrelevant). Now, we use some logic. We need to find time h, which is when the total hamster population will equal 1,000,000. So we need to take the integral from 0 to h. Using the first fundamental theorem of calc, g(h) - g(0) = 1,000,000. G(0) = (1/2), so g(h) = 1,000,000 - 1/2. According to my calculations, you have about 3.8 seconds to get clear of the store, so if you took the time to work the problem out, you're already dead. stupid hamsters.
I've alwais foud it useless. I mean WHY I have o crash my brain on a useless math problem when a calculator (or a PC for that matters) can do it easily and effortlessly? And I know your reply: "What if you've got no calculator?" - I'll go buy one! Or are you talking about some weird future whit no calculators? A post-nuclear one of course! Won't be better then to study how to survive a nuclear apocalypse then? How can knowing the exact mass of a sphere save my as* that day?
I've alwais foud it useless. I mean WHY I have o crash my brain on a useless math problem when a calculator (or a PC for that matters) can do it easily and effortlessly? And I know your reply: "What if you've got no calculator?" - I'll go buy one! Or are you talking about some weird future whit no calculators? A post-nuclear one of course! Won't be better then to study how to survive a nuclear apocalypse then? How can knowing the exact mass of a sphere save my as* that day?
Why do we learn history when there is wikipedia? Why do we learn to talk when we can text? Why do I bike when I can drive? Why do I wake up when I could sleep all die?
Okay, Here's a practical, everyday example for why you need to know calculus.
Say you're shopping at the mall, when you notice that the hamsters in the pet store are breeding like crazy, at a rate of f(t) = t * e^(t^2), where t is time in seconds and f(t) is hamsters per second. Your father is the manager of the store, so you know that the shop has a maximum capacity of exactly one million hamsters. You need to figure out how much time you have to evacuate the store before it reaches maximum hamster capacity and explodes. So what do you do? You use calculus (hopefully you brought your calculator shopping)! First, you need to find the integral (we'll call it g(x) because I can't make an integral symbol) of the rate, which would be g(x) = (e^(t^2))/2 + c (in this case the "c" is irrelevant). Now, we use some logic. We need to find time h, which is when the total hamster population will equal 1,000,000. So we need to take the integral from 0 to h. Using the first fundamental theorem of calc, g(h) - g(0) = 1,000,000. G(0) = (1/2), so g(h) = 1,000,000 - 1/2. According to my calculations, you have about 3.8 seconds to get clear of the store, so if you took the time to work the problem out, you're already dead. stupid hamsters.
I didn't understand one bit of that. xD
Well, I've never actually seen a calculus problem either.
