Comment of the Day

I uttered an unintended doozy today, and it's actually a quote that is not offensive in any way. (Many of my doozies that get past my filters --- which are very weak filters, for those of haven't experienced me enough yet --- have a tendency to offend somebody, or occasionally several people. Though some of them are also funny, at least in my opinion.)

I was trying to explain to some of my students that the subjects of asymptotics and perturbation theory required a lot of art. (To borrow a phrase from Michael Berry, I called it "witchcraft" at some point --- though to be honest, I was also thinking that I really would like be watching some episodes of Buffy and Angel.) I wanted to make the point that it wasn't just a matter of being mechanical and grinding a crank. So I said something along the lines of "Asymptotics is the Terminator 3 of mathematics; it's only partially mechanical." (I should say that almost none of mathematics is purely mechanical, though many of the things my students have seen up to this point in their careers have largely been mechanical. I was trying to assert how much creativity, thinking, and experience is required in asymptotics compared to most of the stuff they had seen previously. As you can see, I came up with a resoundingly-successful analogy. For that matter, I'm even wondering if the T3 part of my analogy was inaccurate. I never even saw the movie.)

I'll try to be more poetic during my next class.