Have you ever had a class where you go in and learn something, something that may even make total sense, but then be left wondering, "But...why did I need to learn that?" One might think of earlier times when things such as Calculus, Statistics, or maybe English class seem irrelevant. Looking back, however, there's almost some potential for application. Well today I had one of those moments. We learned about Factorization--basically, a matrix A can be separated into two other matrices, L times U (a lower and an upper triangular matrix), and after the fact I just had to ask myself: "Why did we just learn that?" Just a funny little thought, and I don't mean to sound irritated--really, I thought it was quite funny. Still, I couldn't help but think to my Physics classes where it seems that you never learn anything without obvious implications. Ha ha, I guess you could say I'm glad that that's what I'm going to. Don't get me wrong; I love math and all, but sometimes things can seem a bit...over the top. I'll definitely be interested to see what comes of this class in the future...
~The L.o.t.S. Writer
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I feel that way sometimes with computer science and math. I'm in a discrete math class for computer science right now. Dr. Woodfield will show us a proof for some concept in the typical cryptic notation mathematicians love. Immediately after that, he'll explain the concept in plain English terms and we all nod our heads--it's something we intuitively understood as programmers. Must mathematicians always complicate and obfuscate things? :)
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