Warm Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Eat lots of food and be grateful and stuff! Here's a post I wrote up yesterday - enjoy.

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I just have to give a brief tribute to how much Math 11 blows my mind. Right now I have Prof. Jacobsen, who teaches us Calculus. I will admit that I already like math quite a bit…I took what I thought was a lot in high school (though it turned out to be the bare minimum at Mudd) and generally liked learning the concepts. It more or less made sense.

That was before this class. Now, not only does it make sense, it's ridiculously awesome. We started this class with no idea of what anything was. We invented the idea of limits, and then derivatives, and then integrals. And one class period we just defined the natural log function as lnx = the integral from 1 to x of dt/t.

Today, we didn't have much material to cover, so just for kicks we did some stuff with complex numbers. That is, we proved Euler's identity that e^iθ = cosθ - isinθ, then went on to show e^iπ + 1 = 0, and then made polar coordinates for imaginary numbers make sense, just for kicks. To clarify how happy this makes me, I have to tell you that right now, in Quantum Physics, we're using imaginary numbers ALL THE TIME and up until a few weeks ago I had no idea that Euler's identity even existed. And then, with a brief flurry of chalk and a spoken explanation, it all makes sense. It's fantastic. I feel so happy.

Oh, and that's not even bringing in to this point how cool it is to have Prof. Jacobsen as our prof. I think that usually, with regards to math at Harvey Mudd, Professor Benjamin gets a bit of a celebrity status because of how dynamic he is and his ability to do "mathemagics"…he's quite a character, and pretty much everyone on campus knows who he is. Prof Jakes is less known, but I would say that he's a prime example of how nice it is to go to a college with professors who care. Whenever we finish a large proof, he asks, "Ca va?" (French effectively for "Is that okay?") and we all respond with a loud "Oui, ca va bien!" ("Yes, that's good!"). He's eccentric and fun and makes me look forward to morning classes, which is a formidable feat for a population experiencing continuous mild sleep-dep.

Right now, our professor is drawing a diagram of an airplane wing to introduce multivariable functions. And I think somebody just mentioned a multidimensional chicken. I love this class.