I still have nightmares about that stuff. I don’t think I could do it for amusement value.
If you’ve got a definite integral that needs solving, it’s easier to do it numerically (well, if you have the software that’ll do it for you).
Actually this is what UT Austin subjects their science/engineering students to. Oh and by the way calculators are NOT allowed in any exams from the math department!
Wolfram Alpha will solve this in 0.1 seconds.
Notice above it says 10.0 points.
So in the homework, you get 10 points if you get it right. For each time you get the question wrong, you get negative points. If you get a questions wrong enough times, you will get negative points for that question! Also to prevent cheating, they actually generate the questions for each student, that means everyone’s question is different.
I don’t doubt it. That’s why I have nightmares about it.
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Most science students wouldn’t be able to handle that. Engineering students…no idea. I don’t even know what some of the symbols used mean, for instance the straight lines.
I don’t even know what to integrate something means.
People still figure out a way to cheat on it though… I mean there’s only so many way you can word a question, so often you can download an example from Course Hero and work backwards… or at least for physics (they use the same system) you can find out how to actually solve the question because in physics, you gotta figure out what equations to use, then you get the right answer. So although calculators are allowed in physics exams, it’s still not much easier.
And before you ask, they don’t allow stuff like TI-82 or anything of that sort. TI-30 series is the most advanced calculator they allow (scientific calculators).
Most engineers don’t even use the math on the job. They have software that do this for them.
Integrate is the opposite of derive. It is basically finding the area of whatever is under a curve. The way it works is you slice the area under the curve up into infinite number of little ribbons and you add them all up… The integration symbol, or rather the chain rule and all that, is the easy way to do it. The hard way to show it would make your head explode…
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I can do those based on my memory from my 6 years in engineering school but do i wanna relive that memory? Nope
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When I did my EE undergrad I always found the math modules the easiest way to bump up my grades. Provided you studied, this sort of stuff was quite procedural in my mind. Can’t remember much of it now though.
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So it’s divergent. Extra points if you graph the equation.
Yea, honestly, the work I shown is probably not right… I might have made a mistake somewhere.
Wolfram says it equals zero.
Wow, I’m kind of impressed at how much I’ve forgotten.
I used to be really into and good at calc (comp sci) – but now the only thing I really remember is the power rule.
Proofs have always eluded me though – I kept wanting to hand wave the thing with a “and thus”. With software you can actually run it with a fast iteration cycle – proofs the only feedback you got was your homework a week later
Sometimes I don’t understand all this grueling math. We invented computers so we don’t have to do them.
There is also this idea that we often forget the things we never use in real life. Maths is interesting because all of it is derived from real life and everything can be used in real life but we have technology now so people dont remeber most stuff.
Throughout all my study life, we werent allowed to use calculators in schools now they are pretty common. I wont be surprised if children of future rely solely on tech for simple math we can do in our heads.
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Most engineering students should be able to. This is 1st year calc.
absolute value.
Man, if I was grading that, I might assume you were just using wolfram to begin with. ;D
For those not following along, he let u=-2x^2 so he could substitute out dx from the integral (which he left out of the writing of the problem). du/dx becomes -4x, he solves for dx there, substitutes that back into the integral, pops out the constants, solves the simpler integral, then subsitutes u back in, and bob’s your uncle.
Yep. For the simpler problems, once you know how the tricks to solve a few of them - like in the above, he substituted u for the e exponent term. I would just substitute u for the whole e term - let u = e^(-2x^2), do du/dx = -4e(-2x^2) [chain rule, d(e^n)/dx = de^u/du = du/dx, d(e^u/du = e^u]. Easy peasy.
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True. I solved these in high school calculus. Haven’t used or thought of integrals since, but derivatives are still easy and useful. Most of the questions we were asked to solve were based on word problems, which really opened our eyes to the real world applications. These are used all the time. Most EE work requires calculus, but no engineer is solving these kind of problems by hand. Heck, for all the EE dissertations and articles I’ve reviewed the author(s) simply used programs for all calculations and couldn’t “show their work.” In some cases GIGO resulted in incorrect results, but once you try to apply that in an algorithm, the mistakes become apparent. One EE prof I co-authored with said that I should get a second PhD in EE, as the initials stand for “extremely easy.” Not sure about that.
Yeah I remember this as mostly 1st year basic calculus. 2nd year would then be applied, using this to solve relatively straightforward engineering problems. You’ve still got to understand this stuff if you want to do proper engineering/science, even if you’re just pumping data into excel or the like for analysis.
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really. this is why I chose biology, g’damn that stuff makes my eyes water.
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It’s not really as challenging as it looks - as someone remarked back there, it’s mostly just applying mechanical operations from a table that you can memorize or look up. The only trick is to figure out the best way to apply those operations to get the result you want. It’s just boring rather than difficult.
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