the P.Pole

I eat them for breakfast.

Basically, I’m stuck at home (Toronto) this weekend due to what’s probably the H1N1 flu. Yep, I’m probably gonna be stuck half-crippled for awhile longer (before I either die from drowning in mucus or I get better somehow).

In my down and out state, so far the only thing to really bring some joy and colour back into my days has been working through taking second and third partial and full derivatives of abstract 4+ variable function compositions. I know, what the fuck is that anyway?

I don’t know if it’s the flu or the cabin fever talking, but I am actually enjoying this sort of stuff. Math really is the coolest thing ever for me. I am spending weekend at home creating and working through ridiculous math problems just because the professor said +80% of the class usually completely fail at this type of manipulation/derivation. This means I’ll need the extra practice to keep up.

The fact that I seem to be able to do this better now that I’m sick over healthy suggests that there’s probably a hidden gene somewhere in my DNA, giving me super mathematical insight when aching and coughing profusely. Like Batman, probably.

I’ve never seen anything nearly as complicated as some of these derivatives (single-variable Calculus compared with multi-variable Calculus is like putting on your pants one leg at a time compared with putting them on both legs at once, while playing tetris underwater during a cage match with a fire-breathing monitor lizard). And for someone who at one point failed every single quiz, test, and assignment in high school Calculus, I think I’m doing extra-fantastic. These are the wages of hard work and the reapings of sowings of the excellent Math professors at Waterloo, I believe. It’s cool, because I actually understand what the professor is talking about now, which helps in doing the actual compositions/operations/whatever so much more un-impossible.

Aside: You know what I still find ridiculous though? Teaching us the formal definition of a limit (which defines the derivative) after more than halfway through a term in which we have already been taking derivatives of entire sets of families of functions.

I am glad I chose Math at Waterloo. Business at WLU, on the other hand, well that’s a topic for a different kind of post.