Re: (ReacTor) Defining Our Terms: What Do We Mean by "Hard SF"?

Scott Dorsey wrote:

In article <va6gqd$9366$1@dont-email.me>, Titus G  <noone@nowhere.com> wrote:

Fascinating.
There was only the one Stage 1 Maths course at the NZ University I
attended. It was taken by Science, pre-Medical, Arts... all students and
its main purpose was pure maths in preparation for Stage 2.

 Gatech was the same way.  Everybody took a year of engineering calculus and
memorized the 143 required integrals,

Memorizing integrals?  I can see where it might be useful, but I've never heard of such a requirement.
  whether they were psychology, physics,

or mechanical engineering.  The only people who did not have to take the
engineering calculus classes were management majors (and football players who
had their own special major under the school of management).  Even math students
had to take the things (although they also got a math calculus class later).
I think this was a terrible idea but it did help reduce student retention which
was probably the point.
 

I was aware that there were different levels of Statistics at Stage 1,
for example, the Arts department had their own course for Economics
students but a pass would not qualify you for entry into Stage 2
Statistics in the Science department.

 Okay, statistics is weird...  Psych statistics is a crash course in the kind of
statistics needed for experimental design but without any of the theory behind it.
No combinatorial stuff, but lots of correlation and Student's T Test.  If you
are lucky you get some applications stuff that explains when particular measures
are useful and when they fail, but this is not always the case.
 Math statistics is all proofs as you would expect.  I never took an economics
stats class but I'd be very interested in the curriculum!
 

And having not considered such things for decades, found this thread
diversion fascinating.

 I am still recovering from my experience.  Out here in the real world I have
not solved anything in closed form in ages.  Wish someone had taught about
runge-kutta in college (and where the error bounds are).

I deeply wish I'd been taught the same.
Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg!   I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get RKF4 or RKF8 to deal with my equations some time before continental drift created a new Pangea.
William Hyde