Recent content by Nancarrow

Matrices really come from the idea of vector spaces. A matrix is a "representation of a linear transformation on a vector space, in a given system of coordinates". That's a bit of a mouthful, so in simplified terms: Imagine your ordinary 2D plane with a cartesian system of co-ordinates. Any...

And in Britain, 'b' is called 'c'!

Wow. Do American high schools teach Euclidean geometry with a postulational approach? That's so cool. I'm from the UK and I'm pretty sure that back at school, geometry was mostly just a set of rules to learn and apply. My first contact with Euclid was when I bought the books a couple of years...

I'll tell you next week. (seriously, I have the same, I've been feeling **** about it for the last, oh I dunno, ten years, and can't seem to snap out of it. Yet somehow, life stumbles on and so does mine.)

Dunno about MOST maths, but I found quantum mechanics had the HARDEST maths... and that was only the basic stuff, not even QED.

Except that it isn't true. Er, sorry, I meant: EXCEPT THAT IT ISN'T TRUE.

If a charge was on the surface, the flux would be undefined at that point (since the field itself is undefined at the charge itself)

Hi Dave. You've got to use all sorts of theorems about angles that you've learned by now... as in, facts that allow you to work out one angle given another. What geometrical shapes can you see in the picture? What facts do you know about angles in those shapes? ETA: huh, just noticed the...

Just to elaborate, KTC is talking about https://www.amazon.com/dp/0131103628/?tag=pfamazon01-20. I agree with that choice. It's the standard book on C, as in 'standard against which other books are judged'. It's small. Only thing is it might be a bit terse if you've never done any programming...

Not so much a technique as a notation for me. Specifically, positional notation with zeroes, for representing numbers and doing basic arithmetic with them. What do you get if you multiply XXXVII by LXIV? I don't know, and I'm sure as hell not going to find out! Also as I've started...

Wow, talk about wanting to run before you can walk! Or in this case, wanting to pilot an interstellar spacecraft before you can walk... Okay, I'm pretty sure that if you want a PhD, you really must have a masters degree first. And if you want a masters you need a bachelors first. So get a...

When you have a complicated-looking equation, you should use whatever knowledge you have of algebraic manipulations, to simplify it. Multiply out brackets... collect like terms... eventually you'll be able to put it into a form that you recognise. Also I think your question should go in...

It seems to me that you're supposed to spot the weird symmetry in the numbers here. '7373', '3737', '5252', '2525'. HallsofIvy outlines a general method of solving this problem when the given numbers have no special pattern, but fk only knows how you'd solve those simultaneous equations! My...

Hmm. I keep hearing on the net, over and over again, that one overwrite isn't good enough, that 'some trace' of your data remains, and that professional data recovery firms and/or the NSA can recover the files. As someone dipping their toe into information theory at the moment, this sounds a bit...

Er, you sure about that? Job changes... sure. But career changes?