Bonus Feature
Dec. 9th, 2010 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaSo. For fun this week, I've worked every problem in the old college Algebra book that I had. I have factored many quadratics, found determinants and limits, dusted off Kramer's rule, and so on. As with the quick review, I did the previous week, I found there wasn't really much I didn't still know, though I did rediscover that I still hate logarithms. I don't know why. I can solve the sorts of exponent questions they ask in text books in my head faster than I can write them. I didn't need to use a calculator for any of them. Logarithms on the other hand really slow me down. My brain needs to translate them into exponential form before I can do them for some reason. It's very annoying and inefficient. I was getting faster at doing this after running through about a hundred of them but it was still an unnecessary extra step. I wonder how I can optimize my brain to do this better.
Anyhow. Done with that, I've now moved on to the calculus book. It's a more modern one. Takes a graphing approach and assumes you have a graphing calculator. ... I do not.
No wait. I DO! I have a really really nice one!
Turns out that if one goes to Applications | Utilities on the mac, there's this program called 'Grapher' which is a really really nerd-friendly graphing calculator. Handles multiple graphs, 2d and 3d graphs, animated graphs, labeling, intersections, tracing, the whole nine yards! The 3D graphing in particular is a very exiting find for me. In a couple weeks, I can use it to vastly speed up a research portion of a project I'm going to work on.
My favorite feature however is that it is very nerd-friendly in terms of input. It lets me type formulae like a coder and see them like a math nerd. X^a displays as Xª. If I keep typing it does everything in the exponent but, intuitively, hitting the down-arrow moves me back to base. Typing sqrt() or abs(), etc yields similar results. So I don't have to hunt around for a silly button to do these functions.
I'm sure everyone else has known about this feature for years but it's new to me and as a freebie that comes with the OS I have to say I really really like it.
I'm kind of in an odd spot on how much I'm enjoying this project. On the one hand, it's really nice to know that I haven't lost much of my mathematical abilities though I haven't used them in a long time. On the other hand, it's a little bit depressing that I've let them bitrot this long. I sort of abandoned the one thing I'm really good at. Of course, we'll see how well it holds up as I get into higher forms.
Anyhow. Done with that, I've now moved on to the calculus book. It's a more modern one. Takes a graphing approach and assumes you have a graphing calculator. ... I do not.
No wait. I DO! I have a really really nice one!
Turns out that if one goes to Applications | Utilities on the mac, there's this program called 'Grapher' which is a really really nerd-friendly graphing calculator. Handles multiple graphs, 2d and 3d graphs, animated graphs, labeling, intersections, tracing, the whole nine yards! The 3D graphing in particular is a very exiting find for me. In a couple weeks, I can use it to vastly speed up a research portion of a project I'm going to work on.
My favorite feature however is that it is very nerd-friendly in terms of input. It lets me type formulae like a coder and see them like a math nerd. X^a displays as Xª. If I keep typing it does everything in the exponent but, intuitively, hitting the down-arrow moves me back to base. Typing sqrt() or abs(), etc yields similar results. So I don't have to hunt around for a silly button to do these functions.
I'm sure everyone else has known about this feature for years but it's new to me and as a freebie that comes with the OS I have to say I really really like it.
I'm kind of in an odd spot on how much I'm enjoying this project. On the one hand, it's really nice to know that I haven't lost much of my mathematical abilities though I haven't used them in a long time. On the other hand, it's a little bit depressing that I've let them bitrot this long. I sort of abandoned the one thing I'm really good at. Of course, we'll see how well it holds up as I get into higher forms.
