Recent content by trent.frost

An important principal to keep in mind is that applicants of sufficient caliber are effectively guaranteed to be accepted (somewhere) when they play the odds. An extreme hypothetical example of this is, for example, the number 1 applicant on the planet. Such a person has literally nothing to...

I disagree. And likely so do Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, and Euler, and many others. Here's a quote from Alfréd Rényi to think on: "If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy."

Type-o: completely -> completed Heh

Ah, that's an interesting position to be in. U.S. college, at least good ones like MIT, Caltech, and Columbia, will actually accept applications from home schoolers, even float out high school drop outs who have *not* completely any sort of correspondence programs, but who nonetheless kept...

I can sympathize with your feelings with respect to the exercises; spending hours upon hours doing Spivak's challenging exercises may indeed be impractical. One's time is of course limited, and your intention is to become an expert engineer, a builder and designer of physical things, and not an...