Quote of the Day: Differential Equations and Star Wars Robots

"You know you're in trouble if the different cases for your differential-equation solutions start sounding like the names of Star Wars robots."

(That is my spontaneous gem from today's lecture. We're doing Frobenius series.)

Signs That it's Late Friday Afternoon and You're Exhausted: Number $x$ in a Continuing Series

Signs that it's late Friday afternoon and that you're exhausted (number $x$ in a continuing series): When you're giving a problem class and it's 5:35 pm and you're utterly convinced that you have gone overtime on the class that ends at 6pm, because you think it's after 6pm and the fact that the clock blatantly says "5:35" (though in analog) just doesn't faze you or register in any way.

And also number $x+1$: And also when you say you're going to erase the whiteboard as a courtesy to people who are using the room tomorrow morning ... which is in fact nobody because tomorrow is Saturday.

The legend continues...

Art Class: 2012 Edition

I am taking an art class, just like I did last fall. I have posted pictures from today's class, which was the first of 5 classes. You can find these pictures and also those from last year in this album.

The teacher for this class is Josie Lyons, who also taught the course I took last fall. This year, we are doing portraiture. More importantly, we are using a different medium each week, and a major part of the point is to learn how to use different media. Today was pencil.

Busted

This demotivational poster is a big win. Actually, it's not truly the poster that's a win but rather the TA for the class in question. Nice job!

Alternative Meanings for WTF?

One of my TAs for my nonlinear systems course sent me the following e-mail this evening:

Some students write 'what to show' at the beginning of questions as WTS, but there is one student in B8b who has abbreviated 'what to find' at the start of her questions as WTF. Or at least I hope that's what she meant!

Oh dear...

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.