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

William Hyde  <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

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.

>
I think memorizing integral tables is kind of a standard thing for
engineering calc classes.  The whole point of the class is to be able to
solve hairy integrals as quickly as possible and there's no time to derive
anything that you can memorize.  If you try to derive everything you'll
never get through a fraction of the exams in time.

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.

>
Plot it on graph paper and count the squares...