/sci/ - Science & Math

Here's what I'll tell you. No amount of work is going to make you the next Euler and no amount of crappy education would have kept Euler from being a mathematical genius. That said, the way we teach math these days is downright idiotic and holds students back monumentally. Stop focusing on learning algorithms, start learning proofs. Work through an introductory text on group theory or real analysis; there are plenty in the sticky. These are both basic enough level topics that most proofs you come across can easily be found online if you are struggling. If you come up with a question you can't find the answer to in your book then try to figure it out yourself first.

It isn't so much so that we represent them by sine or cosine functions. I don't think any real physics happens where we're talking about the wave sin(x-t) these days. EM waves are a lot messier than your undergrad courses will lead you to believe, even laser light is going to be composed on packets of different frequencies.

What is nice though is that most functions that happen in the real world can be expressed as a sum of different sine and cosine functions, this is called its Fourier series. Next to(...?) the Taylor series it is probably the most important in physics and I would emphatically recommend you learn it.

>I've been to the doctors, and had blood tests and an ultra sound, both of which they were not at all worried about.


They'd have given you a PET or CT scan if there was any legitimate worry. If you've had lymphoma for a year now you'd know about it.

Post it here?

>>6481242
I'm not an undergrad. I also pretty strictly speak about things I understand though.

>>6477722

Looks fine.

>>6477322

>In fact, we have accomplished this on a very small scale with individual particles.

What experiment are you referring to?

>>6477919
I have no idea where you got this notion.

Okay cool, what would you like to discuss?

The people who grew up with a constant fear of being nuked by the Soviets are now running the country and therefore making the decisions about nuclear energy and essentially anything related to the term "radiation."

>>6475703
>>6475707

Totally meant to say 1900.

>>6475355

Physics can--extremely loosely speaking--be divided pretty cleanly into four realms.

The first is classical physics. F=ma and everything that came from that. Generally speaking anything pre-1990 is classical physics, which adequately explains and derives the motion of massive and slow-moving objects.

Physics advanced in two main directions in the early 1900's. Planck's explanation of the black body spectrum as well as the work of many physicists in working out the behavior of atoms led to quantum mechanics, which holds for an object with very little mass, moving at a negligible portion of the speed of light.

Meanwhile, Albert Einstein and a retinue of mathematical physicists were beginning to explain the geometry of spacetime subject to a finite maximum speed (the speed of light), ushering in relativity. Relativity holds for a massive body moving at high speeds.

Quantum field theory is a fourth field of physics which is pretty much the backbone of modern particle physics. It is a theory that can describe the behavior of a very small particle (as in quantum mechanics) moving at an appreciable percent of the speed of light.

The whole point of linear algebra is that it allows us to take some shit that doesn't make sense to us and treat it as some shit that does make sense to us to some extent (ie R^n). I like the spirit of his approach but there simply needs to be some geometric study of R^2 and R^3 in a linear algebra course. Undergrad linear algebra is all about drawing useful comparisons.

The idea is that each logician knows he wants a beer but only the one who responds last can comment on whether or not all three of them would like a beer.

Because it is a new disease, first properly described in the late 1930's. Also, people bother going to the doctor now when something seems wrong but not life threatening.

I'm not saying there aren't environmental factors but really all of these correlations you see with autism are a load of shit. A whole lot of things have increased in prevalence since 1938 because, like autism, a lot of these things didn't exist before 1938.

It'll still taste like crap and it will still get you drunk.

Either the first graduate level course in real analysis or linear algebra I took. Real analysis was a near life-changing course, learned more and matured more academically than I'd have ever thought possible.

The fact to me that, completely irrespective of what mathematical discipline or level of study one is dealing with, the numbers e and pi have such ubiquity to them has always amazed me. In fact it was what convinced me to go into a quantitative field.

>>6443379

Seriously you need only study basic geometric optics to get the underlying point as to why higher frequency means higher resolution.