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99 Comments
- Mark4483, on 10/12/2007, -1/+59I'm trying to teach Linear Algebra right now and this is a GREAT answer to the question "when am I ever going to use this".
- kiiwii, on 10/12/2007, -14/+64Story buried for making me feel dumber.
- pbaehr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+31If you're ever stuck with an answer on real-world applications of a concept I like to fall back on this one:
Student: Why are we learning about integrals? I'll never use this in the real world!
Teacher: Well, let's say you're walking down a dark alley. All of a sudden a man with a gun jumps out from behind a dumpster. He aims the gun at your head and with his other hand points to an equation scrawled in chalk on the brick wall. He says, "You have 1 minute to solve this integral or I'll blow your ***** head off." What then? - deathray, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22The HTML version of the PDF
http://72.14.209.104/search?hs=sUq&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.rose-hulman.edu%2F~bryan%2FgoogleFinalVersionFixed.pdf&btnG=Search - euphemizeme, on 10/12/2007, -4/+20Should have been born Asian then.
"Hard working, good at math" -- Bob Dole - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1595% of people would have their head blown off
- jarbro, on 07/23/2009, -2/+17i wish i was good at math.
- Fedge, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17Did anyone else notice IMMEDIATELY that this was written in LaTeX? I guess I've grown to love that type face. I guess this pads my nerd cred...
- ST0N3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11dugg for all the damn kids who say, "when are we ever going to have to use THIS" well, the next time you use google you will.
- Refusedb, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13If you were to take a differential equations course, you would use linear algebra to understand extremely complex differential equations.
Take a look at the Lorenz Equations for example. - GawtMilk, on 10/12/2007, -12/+23No revenue comes from searches, the money is made through ads.
- darkstar949, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9@MisterFlau - Use Google Code Search instead of just vanilla Google if you are looking for code: http://www.google.com/codesearch
- benggg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10I automatically digg LaTeX generated PDFs. They are sooo sexy.
- logicnazi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9It's not patience that matters and practice does matter but not in the way most people assume. What really matters is interest and curiosity.
The students I see who spend hours slaving over their homework because of their work ethic can't get much beyond calculus while those students who spend a lot less time but are actually interested and curious about why things work the way they do can often go as far as they want in mathematics. I used to think it was all about intelligence but the more time I've spent teaching mathematics the more I've been struck by the fact that what really matters is whether the student just wants an answer or wants to know why (which of course depends on IQ indirectly).
The real problems with math education are twofold.
1) Pre-college math teachers simply don't know enough math to teach math as anything but a boring rote procedure. Despite having gone to very good schools before college I only ended up doing math because I was so disgusted at the explanations my teachers could (or would) give I went and bought some real books about it on my own. Unfortunately the very desirability of mathematical ability works against us by drawing qualified individuals away from teaching.
2) The type of teaching needed to interest, stimulate and engage the students who can really understand the material is incompatible with the type of teaching needed to give the students who don't care a minimal level of competency. Unless you give them an algorithm or something else they can grip ahold of the students who don't want to think about the problem will give up but in order to interest and engage students in the real math you need to avoid teaching/testing algorithmically or in other rote manners. - squeevey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8@Dudibob
No..that's Scientology. - iranian, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Yeah but the reason my personal search engine I wrote last year doesn't make that much money is the linear algebra thing.
- Malakin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@godfreytech
There's a PDF warning becuase by default PDF's load directly into your browser and can either cause slowdown or non-responsiveness.
However, there is a simple solutions to this.
Set PDF's to open in your PDF reader and not the plugin in the browser.
Here's how to do this in Firefox:
Tools->Options->Content->Manage
Find PDF and set it to open in your PDF reader and not the plugin.
If you have a slow computer, Foxit's PDF Reader may feel a lot faster than Adobe's and you can get that here:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/
On faster computers I don't really notice much difference. Abode's latest version is faster than the previous versions though and it's worth taking the few minutes to upgrade to it.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html - Scyth3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Everyone knows google uses the PigeonRank system:
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html - chalkboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6@scabbers (#6510550)
Learn how to search. I usually find what I need first time. If you are looking for code you do not Code and expect it to know what kind of code. - bIuebonics, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6if you want to know how math can be useful in the real world, take a physics or engineering course that parallels the mathematical material you're taking. aside from that i don't see what the big deal is about applications of mathematics. math is more interesting at the abstract levels...
- unusualbob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5If page.text.includes("09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0") = true then
page.rank = "N/A"
End If - bIuebonics, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8some people are just inherently worse at math than others. not to trounce on the modern theme that everyone is exactly the same and nobody can be different at all, there are definitely people who just fail at math. i've seen plenty of them; quite a few, who actually try to understand math, tend to dislike me for my ability at math. and there it is. :P
- driftwood07, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11we just got finished learning about eigenvectors in differential equations. i feel like i learned something now.
- xartemisx, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Concurrently teaching linear algebra with diff eq is what my university does, and it's effective. I think once you can get someone to be familiar with how important a vector is, the importance of linear algebra becomes obvious.. but for non math/science students, this is a really good application of linear algebra.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@Malakin
"Abode's latest version is faster than the previous versions though and it's worth taking the few minutes to upgrade to it."
Check your Startup folder guy. Adobe Reader 7.0 feels faster because they keep it running in the background 100% of the time just waiting to show you a pdf.
Reader is nothing but bloat-ware . . . - rcronk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Does anyone have a link to the "Eigenvectors for Dummies" book? I hate it when material is trying to teach something but it ends up being useful only to those who already know how it works. Oh well. Maybe I'm just a dummy.
By the way, the "when am I ever going to use this" question is dumb. Working through mental challenges strengthens your capacity to think and reason in general and so it doesn't really matter if you're "ever going to use this." It's kind of like someone working out in a gym complaining that they're never going to be under a bar and having to push it up and down in "real life" so why bother doing it now? Sure you may use it in "real life" but even if you don't, it's good exercise anyway. - bIuebonics, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4unless PR stunt equals applied mathematics then i doubt your assertion. :P
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4For those of you having trouble with the text, I found the section on Dangling Nodes(2.2.2) especially helpful in explaining the probabilistic interpretation of substochastic eigenvector matrices.
- Veign, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It was so obvious!
- kernsj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Sergey Brin's dad taught me linear algebra in college. He used to make fun of us and say we'd all get fired from our jobs (scientists and engineers) if we didn't learn the material. He was totally right. Then he'd say that our new textbooks were full of nonsense and claim that he could break our calculators with a few commands. He was a funny professor.
- loconet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not but that's a pretty ironic statement to make considering what this article links to.
- logicnazi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4The problem with this 'what's it good for' attitude is that it fundamentally caps how far you can go in advanced technical fields. My experience teaching mathematics is that those students who are only interested in the material for some particular use or application fail to really understand it at a deep level. Quite simply the way to best fully understand the mathematics is to approach it in an elegant and abstract fashion. However, if you're goal is to just learn some *particular* application one can always take the shortcut of just learning the algorithms and rules but this will backfire if you want to go beyond that particular application.
I'm all for giving examples of how mathematics is used so the students think it isn't just useless junk. However, giving students the impression that learning a particular area of mathematics (linear algebra, diff eq etc..) needs to be justified by some concrete application needs to be avoided. Many of the reasons to learn it are simply too distant or too hard to see before one understands the math to work with the students. - dawgma, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5/insert bunny with a pancake on it's head here
- imacashew, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4why do you feel dumber after reading that? Even if you skim the really complex stuff you still get the general idea and it's quite brilliant. I actually read a less complicated article on this same topic years ago but it wasn't nearly as interesting (to me).
- LonesomeFighter, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4ya darkstar has a point, not everything is best searched directly through google.com. Google has specialized search engines. Search engines for code, videos, pictures, maps, government sites, finance, etc.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Yeah, no kidding.
They've done something recently to make searches less accurate. It's especially a bitch searching for anything programming related since a lot of it is syntax which it doesn't pick up so well. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ logicnazi
I agree with you in principle; learning for learning's sake is wonderful. But I find that when I encounter a difficult subject -- especially math -- I find that a real world context helps me understand the concepts.
Math is a language used to describe the world around us -- both seen and unseen -- so asking what linear algebra "describes" is not only reasonable but shows that a student respects the language enough to want to understand it more fully. - imacashew, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"-sex -porn -crazy -frog -paris -digg -renetto"
well duh....you can't do a search with nothing but exclusions :-) - imran7, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3ok i just went through 4 months of agony last semester, finally its over and now this ***** pops up on digg! when will it end!!!
- cwcentral, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Dugg but inaccurate... It's adsense technology (integrated with page rank) that's makes up 98% of that $25B.
- edzieba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Take a Cybernetics course. By the end of the first year, you'll finally see how differentiation, integration, transfer functions, linear algebra and matrices start to come together into a useful and powerful tool for circuit and system analysis and modelling.
- bIuebonics, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@pbaehr
if i had a nickel for every time that's happened to me... :P - gthrank, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Beautiful for its mathematical elegance. It's a logical idea, but only Google commercialized it.
- imacashew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ha Ha Ha...oh man that was a good read...I haven't been caught hook, line and sinker like that in a while. I totally thought I was reading something semi-serious up until the "When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one."...then again maybe I'm a little slow. What brilliant sarcasm!!
- mexman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3PR stunt? You can't be serious. They changed how most people live & work with that algorithm; all while not being evil. You cannot say the same for religion.
- waldorian, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm not going to read all that. I will just assume is was good and dig it.
- mmalone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Seems to work for me, but you can grab it from http://immike.net/files/googleFinalVersionFixed.pdf if the original link isn't working.
- clipless, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Holy *****, I went to Rose-Hulman. I never thought I'd see them on digg.
- iamhumble, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1take differential equations if you really want to learn
- Enigmatarius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I didn't even understand half of that. Still, looks pretty damn good. Dugg!
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