JR5
Other Christian
I'll start:
Thanks libs.
Pennsylvania: $4 mil/yr spent on gifted ed, $2 bil on special ed
https://aghostinthemachine.substack.com/p/which-way-usaThanks libs.
Education Thread
- Thread starter JR5
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The more STEM-oriented the field of study, the more "conservative" the professors tend to be, albeit in a limited way.
I thought I'd cross-post this here to not pollute the other thread.
For quite a while now I've been thinking back on this. The extent and variety of topics around "diffie Q" that I was forced through.. analytic solutions, numerical solutions, partial DE etc. All of this stuff -
Numerical methods for ordinary differential equations - Wikipedia
So this stuff had been mainly out of my head for years, but it has come up for two reasons. One is that a friend of mine tutors students, we used to study together and while I have not really touched that stuff for a long time, he has contact with it on a weekly basis.
Second reason is someone else I know is progressing through an advanced programming course with a mathematical bent. I kept hearing the stories of how they were being "challenged" with increasingly difficult tasks and the last I heard was they were being asked to write object oriented code to solve these DEs. I never did that back in the day, it's taking it to an even higher level of abstraction. I think that I would have used "objects" which were already from programming libraries, I never coded the objects myself.
So getting to the point of why I am posting - how many of you have used differential equations in any form whatsoever outside of education, high school university courses and other vocational training?
I really want to know.. Sure some of the stuff is brain exercise but the number of hours and intensity of it seems to me over the top for something that almost no-one ever uses in the real world.
Maybe I have not spent quite enough time in the technical roles to see it, but if it were being used in the workplace not just in university courses I would have heard of it.
Actually, now that I think of it, I did work for someone who used it himself and had clients who used it but they were very deep in mathematical modelling.
I would guess that only academics, researchers and a very small subset of STEM roles, extremely senior engineers, would actually use this stuff that the vast majority is tortured with excessively. I'm a bit resentful about the time wasted and wear and tear on your mind when one could have been doing something else more useful for business and for life.
So if any of you have any thoughts on this, have you used it or seen it used outside of an education context, would be interesting to hear.
I thought I'd cross-post this here to not pollute the other thread.
For quite a while now I've been thinking back on this. The extent and variety of topics around "diffie Q" that I was forced through.. analytic solutions, numerical solutions, partial DE etc. All of this stuff -
Sometimes they get you solving ODE's or PDE's just for the jolly sport of it, other times it does come from an engineering or other scientific problem. So many steps to torture your mind with, turning a problem into a DE, then applying a recipe to it and writing code in some kind of programming language to solve it (in multidimensional space)Numerical methods for ordinary differential equations - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
So this stuff had been mainly out of my head for years, but it has come up for two reasons. One is that a friend of mine tutors students, we used to study together and while I have not really touched that stuff for a long time, he has contact with it on a weekly basis.
Second reason is someone else I know is progressing through an advanced programming course with a mathematical bent. I kept hearing the stories of how they were being "challenged" with increasingly difficult tasks and the last I heard was they were being asked to write object oriented code to solve these DEs. I never did that back in the day, it's taking it to an even higher level of abstraction. I think that I would have used "objects" which were already from programming libraries, I never coded the objects myself.
So getting to the point of why I am posting - how many of you have used differential equations in any form whatsoever outside of education, high school university courses and other vocational training?
I really want to know.. Sure some of the stuff is brain exercise but the number of hours and intensity of it seems to me over the top for something that almost no-one ever uses in the real world.
Maybe I have not spent quite enough time in the technical roles to see it, but if it were being used in the workplace not just in university courses I would have heard of it.
Actually, now that I think of it, I did work for someone who used it himself and had clients who used it but they were very deep in mathematical modelling.
I would guess that only academics, researchers and a very small subset of STEM roles, extremely senior engineers, would actually use this stuff that the vast majority is tortured with excessively. I'm a bit resentful about the time wasted and wear and tear on your mind when one could have been doing something else more useful for business and for life.
So if any of you have any thoughts on this, have you used it or seen it used outside of an education context, would be interesting to hear.
I have used it for work. I had some code that needed a simulated spring, which I modeled as a second order differential equation. I don't recall why that was part of the system, but I remember doing it.
I have not used DE problem solving specifically for work, buuuut I've found similar knowledge rewarding in a different way. One of my sons is very math smart (much more than me). We recently discussed the differential/incremental gain on various skills as measured by earning power. Idea being to stretch your skill set so as to maximize area exposure under the curve. Imagine if that is actually a volume calculation, then the incremental gain is much larger.
Maybe common financial metrics are just diffie Qs re-stated. Return on investment, asset, debt, pain, etc. The idea is to maximize the difference (positive return) and then shift resources when the incremental gain starts to diminish. If you can manufacture 10,000 cars, but only deliver 8,000, but your sales force can only hustle out 6,000, then you have a sales problem (and hopefully soon a freight problem). If you can sell 20,000 cars but only make 10,000, that's a different problem. You're always trying to balance production, delivery, and sales. Not sure if that's a real DE, but it feels like it to me.
Maybe common financial metrics are just diffie Qs re-stated. Return on investment, asset, debt, pain, etc. The idea is to maximize the difference (positive return) and then shift resources when the incremental gain starts to diminish. If you can manufacture 10,000 cars, but only deliver 8,000, but your sales force can only hustle out 6,000, then you have a sales problem (and hopefully soon a freight problem). If you can sell 20,000 cars but only make 10,000, that's a different problem. You're always trying to balance production, delivery, and sales. Not sure if that's a real DE, but it feels like it to me.
