Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Funny how it all comes back to you
I guess the stereotypical situation is, Junior brings his Algebra homework home from school, and his parents groan about how much they hated their Algebra class, then die a little inside as they struggle to help him with his homework. But that’s not THIS family. Karen more or less minored in Mathematics at Berkeley, and I was no slouch myself (though nowhere near as proficient as she was).
Still, neither one of us has done much Calculus in the last thirty years, and hey, you forget stuff. You forget the chain rule and the product rule. I even forgot some simple things about taking derivatives. But you know what? It doesn’t take long to recover all those old skills.
I can even recapture some of the joy I derived from Calculus homework . . . the way each problem was a little puzzle, and how great it was to get the right answer in the most efficient manner possible. There’s a saying in science that a lazy scientist is a good scientist, and the same is true for math. If you’re working too hard at something, chances are you’re doing it wrong. Long division excepted: that’s always a bitch.
Is it like that in all disciplines, I wonder? Certainly must be true for programming. And writing, I suspect, since some of the best crafted novels seem so simple at their core. Although messy novels have their place, too.
I can’t wait until Jake gets to Integral Calculus. Now that’s entertainment.
D.
A lazy doctor is a BAD doctor.
Whether or not laziness is a good quality depends on your working definition of ‘lazy’:
1. Getting the correct solution in the most efficient way possible for all time. This usually means spending time to solve a problem properly, once.
2. Shoving the problem onto someone else’s plate. This usually involves writing another IF statement in an already Byzantine mass of spaghetti code.
I am Lazy1. Many, many programmers are Lazy2 – throw a solution at the problem that patches the immediate issue, whether or not it is sustainable. The problem with Lazy2 isn’t merely that a Lazy2 programmer defers the correct resolution to a later date and possibly another programmer, it is that a Lazy2 programmer defers the correct solution and, later, the correct solution is more complex. In fact, I’d guess that complexity varies as the square of the degree of deferment, and by the time a central problem has been patched and deferred 4 times, it approaches unsolvability within the available budget-space.
Lazy1 people are pretty rare. There are many more Lazy2 people than Lazy1 people. All managers are Lazy2, that’s how you become a manager. Lazy2 people don’t like Lazy1 people, because Lazy1 people with any authority make Lazy2 people do things they don’t want to do.
Back in my day we ended high school with differential calculus, so never got to the rest of it, but I still relish digging my teeth into a juicy math problem when the situation calls for it.
It’s attributed to various sources (von Moltke the Elder, Grant, Napoleon), but the version attributed to Rommel is “Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders.”
i completely sucked at math, but the hub has an engineering degree and took so much math that hearing about it makes my head hurt. he has a math philosophy you and k. might relate to? “calculus is easy. algebra is difficult. arithmetic is impossible”.
i know he didn’t make that up, but still.
and btw, i’m teh awesome at arithmetic. lol
Noxcat: agreed, although you could make an argument that a lazy surgeon has his merits. (Lazy in the sense of trying to get the job done in the simplest manner possible.) But you’re right, I would not want a lazy internist.
Dean: the original comment I learned (“a good scientist is a lazy scientist”) refers to your definition 1. The idea here is that experiments that are simple and elegant generally produce the cleanest, easiest to interpret results.
ps: I like that 🙂
joolz: I like that one, too 🙂
i am awesome at math but i hate most of it. because it’s not useful to me. but i really liked the logic of algebra, and sometimes doing a proof in geometry was like a puzzle and i loved how it clicked. but once i was done with my 3 years in HS (geo, alg 2, and trig/intro to calc) i say HELL NO am i doing calculus, i wanna play with babies all day for a living! haha.
at my high school the trig level is now called TR/AG/IC. how awesome is that?
Shaina, Shaina, Shaina! If you quit before doing calculus, you never got to the FUN STUFF!
Can you still take more classes?
i have to take classes for my masters, but NOT calculus. I think it is a waste of my time–I’m planning to be a preschool teacher for heaven’s sake. i’d rather study child development and educational theories and such.
In high school our daughter was a terrible slacker in Math. She had many issues her Sophomore year and as the year end loomed, she had some bad grades and was on a course to fail Algebra II. The headmaster called us all in for a consultation, and implied that perhaps our daughter would be better off at another school since they had many students on the waiting list to attend, and our daughter was not doing her part. Not to mention the steep tuition we were paying/wasting. I remember like it was yesterday him telling her that if she would just study really hard for the rest of the year and pass Algebra II, she would never again have to study Math. Free before and after school tutoring was available. Well, she failed it, but took a remedial course and passed with flying colors. She came around and the rest of high school was a breeze. Letting her fail was a lesson she needed to learn. In college she mainained a 4.0, earned a merit-based scholarship and graduated with high honors.
I did great in high school math (which ended with trig), and loved it, but calculus in first year almost killed me.