No, epsilon-delta doesn't seem arbitrary, the book's way of explaining it does. I know that it opens up potential for more substantial proofs and gives more specificity to the definition of a limit and I already had a basic understanding of the concept (although I wanted to review it since it's...
Thanks for responding, and I understand your concern, but I'm at least looking for a better textbook. Thomas is not working for me. I need to know things on a deeper level, I've always been that way. I'm terrible at memorizing things for the sake of memorizing. I was previously in a...
Hi, while I see this question has been beaten to death I don't feel I know the answer for myself. I've been looking at picking up a calculus text of Apostol or Spivak while I go back this fall. I'll be taking the second half of first year calculus starting september (integration, diff...
If that's what you want though, to teach and research in an academic setting with relative control over your work with the ability to still collaborate with others - then being a professor sounds ideal.
Another option would be to start your own business. It's not exactly the same, but all of...
That's a good point physics girl phd about parabolas. It was 2D non-linear functions and their transformations that really renewed my interest in mathematics in high school. Here were these methods for making sense of what was previously a garble of "do it this way" identities and formulas. I...
Personally, I try to visualize everything I do because I find it very fascinating - sort of like when you're a kid and you ask why something works the way it does because you just need to know. I see it unfolding in my mind, and I try to develop sort of an intuitive grasp of it that is...
Thanks for the responses (and sorry this came so late, I'm not sure why I missed them before). I think I'm going to stick with the math/physics route and maybe take some engineering courses as they interest me (it appears that many engineering courses are open to math/physics majors with...
I was doing some reading on X-ray binaries and got to reading the wikipedia article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_binary
When I read this line:
"The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays. (Hydrogen fusion...
While large parts of the link you gave were a bit beyond me, I think I understand the significance behind why Quaternions are they way they are as a sort of base for "associative division algebras" (along with real numbers and complex numbers). I was reading this letter from Hamilton on how he...
All right, I've been doing a lot of reading on quaternions, and while I think I understand how to use them, I'm still very confused as to why certain things are defined the way that they are. First question:
Why, when multiplying the imaginary portions of quaternions do you get these "rules"...
I'd really like some feedback on this question. While I understand that some of what I said goes beyond choosing a major (struggling with crowds is an obvious example), I'd really like to know what your inclination would be because I've been struggling with this question for awhile now.
Hi, to start I'll give some background on myself. I've been out of high school for 4 years now - for a year and a half of that I went to university doing a BSc in Kinesiology but left the program (hard to explain completely but I didn't know what I wanted to do/study, I struggled with big...
The difficulty isn't with checking my work. There's a good reference in the back of my textbook for answers. The problem is that it takes me a very long time to actually do the work. Writing out several iterations of a 4x10 matrix for an operation with the simplex method, for example, takes a...
I'd like to find a mechanical solution to matrix operations and computations. Currently, my emphasis is on a useable tool/method for Gauss-Jordan Elimination and the Simplex Method in Linear Programming due to the sheer amount of time that calculating and writing everything by hand takes. I...