/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6730954
Your family doesn't know how to use wikipedia? Some people are not as dumb as they look, just saying. But most are.

>>6730954
Meh. to me it's just depressing. I wish my parents had gotten their shit together and obtained some useful level of education. their lives would be a lot easier (and so would mine).

pic related.

>>6730957
I know my family. They could use wikipedia, but my parents are older people into history, they will never see the need to learn high school math all over again, and probably never get to that point

Eh, I've forgotten more about calculus than what the majority of the current human population will ever now. It's no big deal.

>>6730957
>knowing a math concept equals being able to read wiki article

/sci/ user detected

>>6730971
how deep does the rabbit hole go for you, friend?

>>6730957

From wikipedia:

>The derivative of a function of a real variable measures the sensitivity to change of a quantity (a function or dependent variable) which is determined by another quantity (the independent variable). It is a fundamental tool of calculus. For example, the derivative of the position of a moving object with respect to time is the object's velocity: this measures how quickly the position of the object changes when time is advanced. The derivative measures the instantaneous rate of change of the function, as distinct from its average rate of change, and is defined as the limit of the average rate of change in the function as the length of the interval on which the average is computed tends to zero.

Yeah, I could see my dad reading that [/sarcasm]

>>6730954
>tfw my father does, my little sister does, and I don't

I'm the only member of my family who finished high school

>>6730954

>tfw your immediate family is barely literate
>tfw they will never enjoy math

>>6730954
Did none of your family finish Highschool?

>>6730954
>My mother has a masters degree in topology
Feelsbadman.

>>6730954
>tfw you wake up realizing are the only member of your family who knows and ever will know what a Hilbert space is

my mom went to a technical college to get a license in order to be a beautician

my dad dropped out college in junior due to a divorce and ridiculous girl problems

my half siblings went to college but dropped out

if I actually make it through college, then I will be the first to have an actual degree and career

christ this board is insecure

>>6731788

This is 4chan, dude. Some things you just can't get away from.

>>6730957
>he probably thinks he understands etale cohomology just from reading the article

>>6731526
>masters degree in topology

>>6730954
How can someone not know what a derivative is? If a movie comes out, and another movie comes out that's pretty much the same, it's a derivative!

White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen were derivatives, for example.

Sometimes a movie is a spin-off from another franchise, those are also derivative, like The Penguins movies from Madagascar, or the Ewok movies from Star Wars.

>>6731822
Technically, saying masters degree in mathematics would be relatively meaningless so topology makes more sense in a sense.

>>6731997
My dad has a master's in double integrals.
He was planning on going into a PhD program for triple integrals, but at the time it was an extremely esoteric and niche subject with hardly any relation to the rest of mathematics, let alone real life.
Of course, this all changed when Shinichi Mochizuki demystified triple integrals using abstract inter-Universal Teichmüller theory, and more recently when Jacob Barnett found applications of triple integrals in algebraic quantum gravito-electromagnetism.
Needless to say, my dad remains unemployed and lives with his (now deceased) grandmother.

>>6732204
>lives with his (now deceased) grandmother
umm

>>6732220
She happened to die while he was living there

>>6730984
OP's post says 'know what a derivative is'
from wiki: The derivative of a function of a real variable measures the sensitivity to change of a quantity (a function or dependent variable) which is determined by another quantity
if I memorized this, would I not 'know what a derivative is'?
what are you, retarded?

>>6731987
Just because OP's thread is shit doesn't mean you should be derivative of it, man.

>>6732224
>if I memorized this, would I not 'know what a derivative is'?

Yes.

pleb family

>>6732236
stop being so complacent sir

>>6730954
>having a face for such a situation
congratulations on learning babby tier mathematics. lemme guess, the teacher writes some theorem on the board, you copy it down, then you apply the theorem a few times? yeah, so impressed.

>>6732241
>stop being so complacent
do you even know what that word means?

>tfw you are the first person in your entire direct genetic lineage to obtain a college degree

Arthur's entire lower body has been crushed by over a ton of metal.

>>6730993
wikipedia is one of the worst resources for learning anything related to math

the people who write math articles there aren't trying to teach, they're just writing a reference in their own highly academic language (which means 99% of people won't have a chance in hell of understanding it at all)

At least simple.wikipedia.org is sometimes useful for basic stuff

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_%28mathematics%29

>>6732444

Yeah, that was my point, actually. >>6730957 seems to think ordinary people can read that shit.

In my family, my father and stepmother are both high school graduates. My father's intelligent, but borderline illiterate (he was taught using some flashcard method back in the 60s, so he never learned to "sound words out"). My stepmother's... not so intelligent, although she's a much better reader. My sister has a learning disability that makes math really difficult for her.

Now, I read that paragraph I quoted, and even knowing what a derivative is, I could barely understand it. No one else in my family has a chance.

>>6732311
as opposed to your indirect genetic lineage you fucking dumbfuck?

>>6732479
>you fucking dumbfuck

>>6732477
I'm an engineer and I've often had to try to implement some kinda technique or whatever in software using research papers.

Most of the times I just give up... trying to cut through the jargon academics use and process it into useful knowledge is excrutiating. If you think wikipedia is bad, try looking some stuff up on Google Scholar.

You'd think that if the goal was to convey knowledge that it could be done using lots of images and simple language instead of flowery bullshit. Some of these guys write like they get paid by the page.

>>6732493
>in ENG102
>they want us to do APA style paper
>around 20 pages (double spaced but still
>literally only papers I've seen longer than 20 pages are nearly always doctoral theses
>or books
>still got an A, burning out >15 pages in the first day

>>6732493
I'm also an engineer.
Academic papers are written for fellow academics.
External reports and user manuals are written for conveying knowledge to the plebs.
> Some of these guys write like they get paid by the page.
a couple of the sections have a format that's expected by the reader.
Gitgood

>>6732507
You'll get really good at writing technical reports by the time you grad. Several courses will require reports around that length (20-30 pages).

>doctoral thesis
Which theses have you seen that are 20 pages? They're usually like ~100-200 pages long.

Even master's theses are 50-100 pages (really depends on the uni though; some masters degrees dont even have a thesis project)

>>6732509
>Academic papers are written for fellow academics
Bullshit. You'll find tons of papers that are written specifically for practical applications. Some papers even come with pseudo-code for software development and things like that and pay special attention to computational complexity for algorithms, etc.

>a couple of the sections have a format that's expected by the reader
If by format you mean two columns, sure. But if you're talking about language and description... there are papers out there that aren't retardedly obtuse. And there are papers out there written by fobs (chinese mostly lel) that are terriber broken engrish. So I have a hard time believing papers would get rejected based on how intelligible it was to a non-expert in the field.

>>6732524
>Some papers even come with pseudo-code for software development and things like that and pay special attention to computational complexity for algorithms, etc.
sounds like an external report.
what journal was it posted in?

> If by format you mean two columns, sure. But if you're talking about language and description...
I'm referring to them repeating themselves four times for the abstract, introduction, [main part of the paper], and conclusion.
And the introduction has to have a description of the previous work.
stuff like that.

As I said, papers are written for academics. It's not unintelligible if you're the target audience. It's not like the layman is gonna up your citation count anyway.

>>6731550
what is that

>tfw your girlfriend is artist

>white people looked down on you
>no car for 16th birthday
>had to take public bus
>no white qt gf to pick up on your way to school
>no traveling outside of the neighborhood during breaks
>could not afford much pokemon merchandise when it was at its prime
>could not see Stone Cold Steve Austin when he came to your city
>could never join a fad on time until it died
>ramen everywhere
Why couldn't my parents be natives of a 1st world country?
>implying adults can have fun nowadays without being drunk gamblers or manchildren
>can only get a used sagtit woman
>not a virgin preteen who paints her toenails pink
I missed out

>>6732722

What, seriously? Poor girls are easy, dude. 'Round about 13 or 14 they start givin' it up to anyone that'll give them some attention. When I was a teenager, I got all kinds of laid on the wrong side of the tracks.

They tend to marry early, though, so if you're an adult now you're probably a bit too late. You can still get some, but they tend to mooch off you.

>>6732713
>tfw I am artist

>>6732713
>having girlfriends
what the fuck, get the fuck out

>>6732713
>tfw your girlfriend is autist

>>6730954

don't really give a shit aside from them never understanding what I spend on my time learning about at school. They know I'm considered "smart", but they really don't know what my major is about (chemical engineering/applied math) or why I'm doing it. All they know is that I get good grades occasionally and will get a good job later.

I don't talk about anything STEM with any non STEM people because I find that it leads to awkward conversations quickly.

>>6732774
>tfw no autist qtϖ gf

>>6732692
A Hilbert space is an inner product space that is complete with respect to the norm induced by the inner product. That is, when you have an inner product <f,g> you have a norm ||f||^2=<f,f>. Now you want it to be complete which means that every Cauchy sequence is convergent.

Hilbert spaces are the natural setting of spectral analysis and quantum mechanics.

Although most of the spaces you can think of can be made into a Hilbert space, it is relatively restrictive but I wouldn't really want to live anywhere else, except maybe in a Banach space.

>>6732790
is this space like reimannian space or euclidean space? or is this something else? what's an inner product?

>>6732778
>don't really give a shit
then STFU fgt

>>6732790
aaaaand this is why math sucks
everything is defined in terms of everything else
pretty much nothing has a clear and intelligible dedfinition

>>6732795
Euclidean space is a Hilbert space but you can consider this a generalization of some of its properties. The standard example of a Hilbert space is the one they use in QM which is L^2(R^n), the square integrable functions on R^n, with respect to the n-fold Lebesgue measure, and inner product the integral of their product with one conjugated.

An inner product on a space H is just a bilinear form on HxH that is conjugate symmetric and positive definite, i.e. <x,y>=<y,x>* and <x,x>>=0 and only 0 for x=0.

>>6730954
test
test
test
test
est
st
t

>>6732815
aaaaand this is why language sucks
everything is defined in terms of everything else
pretty much nothing has a dedfinition which doesn't use other definitions

>>6730954
I've explained it to my family in terms of Earth's gravitational well and how there is no gravity at the center of the Earth, and how the point with the greatest amount is a bit below the crust.

I think they understood, and algebra was the highest they had.

>>6732841
The fuck does that immediately have to do with derivatives? The reason there is no gravity at the center of a ball with a hollow center is because you're being pulled equally in ever direction.

>>6732692
>>6732795
Hilbert space is the abstract space of every mathematically valid combination of properties stuff could have.

If you have a single bit, its Hilbert space is spanned by "on" and "off".

If you have GPS coordinates, the Hilbert space of the coordinates is the surface of a sphere.

If you have an electron around an atom (disregarding the rest of universe), its Hilbert space is given by four integer 'quantum numbers' n,l,m, and s, each combination describing a different way an electron could orbit the atom. If the atom is in an otherwise empty universe, Hilbert space also has three real numbers for describing the position.

>>6732864
How do you turn the sphere into a vector space? When you say in your last example that the Hilbert space is given by four integers you mean that the integers correspond to eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and this will turn out to be an ONB of the corresponding Hilbert space?

I remember when I realized I had surpassed my father.

It was surreal for a few reasons, one of them being that it wasn't until after he died that I ever even realized just how far he had gotten. I didn't know what the study electromagnetic fields and waves was when I was ten, just that it was the cover to one of his many "dad books."

>>6732850
Well I don't think it was ever proven mathematically until derivatives were invented, although I'm sure a geometric proof is possible, and you don't need either geometry or calculus to have an intuition for it.

>>6732864
you have no idea what a hilbert space is.

You just know popsci quantum mechanics, it's not the same thing.

If you knew what a hilbert space is, you would have given the formal, physics-agnostic, definition.

if you knew QM, you would have defined it as a space where a representation of the operator algebra acts. Then you would have specified that observables are contained in the algebra.

The fact that you stated that the Hilbert space of GPS is a sphere is a mixture of sad and hilarious. That's the classical configuration space m8. You didn't even get the classical phase space, you got the classical configuration space.

>>6732815
This post made me sad :c

You're right, the language is a huge barrier to entry and a lot of us aren't very good at communicating the ideas we have, and it's really hard to figure out your assumptions. I don't know what else to say except that math doesn't suck. I'm sorry though :\

>>6732915
>I remember when I realized I had surpassed my father.

a photocopy is never better than the original

you are precisely half the man he was.

>>6732937
and he was half the man his dad was, and so on. by that logic we're infinitesimals of whatever threshold you'd wanna apply to hominids phasing into homosapians.

>tfw my family is much more /sci/ than me.

- mom and dad are college profesors. engineering.
- 2/4 of my grandpas has a PhD (math and EE).
- uncles both PhDs in physics.
- cousin PhD in biology.
- brother Ms in engineering

>>6732953
so are you retarded or something? what's your deal?

>>6732954
second year of CS, hate college.
I LOVE learning but I hate how education works.

>>6732953
the cruel joke of chromosomes...
you get half from your dad
and half from your mom
but duplicates cancel each other out

so if your mom and your dad are both PhDs
you can't do better than a BS

>>6732969
I think I can get one, I'm sure.

The thing is, I have lived most of my life surrounded by people with PhDs.
they are regular people, I can see what's so awesome about the academy.

I learn so much more stuff by my own than in college,
most profesors knows their stuff, but they all fail in teaching the love for that subject.

>>6732977
It has less to do with learning, and more to do with conditioning. If you happen across truths on the way to your degree, don't let those truths be known, or they will hold you back. just pretend that e=mc2 and keep your mouth shut, or you'll end up working at mcdonalds

>>6732989
I wasn't far into my university education when I was told that E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2.

>tfw family expects me to explain modern physics to them because I'm a math major

>>6732790
What the fuck

>family are all respected members of society that contribute actively
>event happens that causes them to go into depression and crawl away from public

>>6733159

What, did you knock up your sister?

>>6732920
He may has no idea what a Hilber space is, but I understood everything he said, what the fuck

My mom is doing her Ph.D but my dad dropped out of college (CS). Out of my three uncles, two have masters and one has a Ph.D. Out of my three aunts, one has a Ph.D and two have masters. My grandpa and grandma have masters and were the principals of reputed institutions. Yet I feel my family is dumb when it comes to practical knowledge on their fields. Degrees don't matter. My dad is more knowledgeable than my uncles and aunts even if he dropped out. But we are not rich so I'm now in a shitty university.

>>6730954
>tfw you don't know and won't ever now what sex is
(apart from reading about it and watching)

>>6733169
isn't it like just cumming, I don't think sex is more pleasurable than just fapping

>Three Engineers in my family
>One Economist
>Dad did a year of statistics

>>6733175
exactly my point

>>6733175
LOL

>>6732224
No, being able to recite a definition doesn't mean you know what concepts the definition actually refers to.

>>6733167
dude, with all due respect, what he said is pure fantasy. Not simplified, I mean plain wrong. Should I not challenge it just because you found it easy to understand?

It's not hard to make something understandable when you get to make it up.

Why is it so hard to accept that some things might just be a little too difficult? Why does everyone here think there is a conspiracy on making things harder? There isn't. Things are said as plain and simple as they can in physics. They just are often hard.

The irony is that this is happening in the
> waaah waah why am I smarter than my family members
thread.

>>6733189
>>6733235
So, fapping is more pleasurable?

>>6732937
>we are just a fraction of what homo heidelbergensis was

they may not know of what a derivative means in the nerd sense of the term, but I am sure they can understand the concept of rateofchange/rateofchange. People know what velocity and acceleration are

but w/e if it makes you feel smart for knowing some baby math concepts good for you
>"man this guy can't change his own oil or brake pads, what a fucking idiot"
>"this guy can't even make deviled eggs, LOL"
^^what you sound like

>>6732477
>>6732444
If you think that is highly academic language for reference then you're literally fucking retarded.

>>6733279
you won't ever know

>>6732223
where do you live.

>>673315
> also math major
> mfw when you have this problem
> mfw my father asks "what's physics?"
> also asked me once whether earth or sun is bigger

>>6730954

>implying you can do calculus correctly

>>6733175

>mfw /sci/ on one comment
>noface

>Mother's side: Two drug discovery researchers and a grandfather who did some mass spectrometry stuff
>Father's side: Hunters/handymen
>MFW I'm the offspring of /sci/ and /k/

>>6733154
>imagine all the empty space in the universe were condensed into a sphere the size of the sun, and this killed god
>modern physics is nothing like this, but it's more unlike any other possible metaphor
There.

>>6732425
this is the hardest i laughed in a while

>>6731822
Her graduation paper was about something in Topology that's what I meant to say. Thanks for being an asshole.