Who's done the most homework in shortest amount of time?

[Jameson]

As I sat this evening doing 7 Calc assignments due tomorrow, I wished to hear any others who might have good stories of cramming/procrastination.

I did these 7 assignments in 3 hours, which I'm sure is no record. Let's hear yours...

Jameson

 

[Sirus]

Amusing.

Coincidentially, this last week was the worst in terms of cramming/procastination of my entire educational career. Last Thursday night, I had slept 2 hours in the last 40 before going to bed. I slept two hours Monday night, one hour Tuesday night, and no more than about three each night in between for about the last week. Last night I came home and slept 12 hours and 15 minutes. : )

Just thought I'd take this opportunity to share. (this is also why I haven't been on PF so much recently...)

 

[motai]

Well this one time in AP Calculus we had a test that took four days and only had five questions (which I assume isn't that foreign in college, but in high school it is rather unusual). It scared the pre-calculus students from wanting to take calculus the next year...

 

[jai6638]

Well this one time in AP Calculus we had a test that took four days and only had five questions (which I assume isn't that foreign in college, but in high school it is rather unusual). It scared the pre-calculus students from wanting to take calculus the next year...

how does that work? you do a question every day??

 

[motai]

how does that work? you do a question every day??

For the first two days. The next three went by faster (thought not by much). The first two questions were insanely long (not because they were hard but because it was tedious). Finding first and second derivatives, graphing the functions, finding critical numbers, inflection points, x and y intercepts, increasing/decreasing over intervals, and concavity over intervals, etc.

The other three were optimization problems that didn't take too long to figure out, but still were moderately-hard to solve.

 

[Timbuqtu]

how does that work? you do a question every day??

I spent about 40 hours on a take-home exam on Generalized Functions Theory. That's life at university.

 

[scarecrow]

I wrote a 30-page research paper in 8 hours. i got an A- on it. ;)

 

[BobG]

I did a semester of geology labs in 3 nights (12 labs total). They only averaged to a C, but that's not bad considering I never took geology.

It wasn't my procrastination - it was stranger. My sister-in-law had procrastinated. Despite my protests about not knowing anything about geology, a box of rocks was Fed-Ex'ed to me with a plea to Fed-Ex the lab reports back in time for her to turn them in ("If you don't know anything about geology, then having you do them isn't really cheating, is it?")

I could rationalize the fact that I did them. A long time before that, her husband left her and her two kids for her 'best friend'. I think it affected her a lot worse than it should have. Around a decade later, she was an alcoholic single mother of 5 living on welfare. With Clinton's welfare reforms, she had a set amount of time to complete some kind of training and get off of welfare or be cut off cold. Good news is that a lot of her college tuition was free. I'd helped with typing up papers and so on when she first started, but then we moved away. Eventually, she was ready to graduate. Her last semester, she had one tough course to complete, plus she needed one more elective. Any course could have satisfied that elective. She could have taken cake decorating or basket appreciation (surely that's easier than actual basket weaving). She chose geology ("It sounded interesting"). After all she'd been through to get her life together, and with graduation plans having already been made, she had to pass that geology course one way or the other.

Okay, I have to admit. None of that really mattered. I still would have said no. But she Fed-Ex'ed me a box of rocks! That almost never happens! How could anyone resist something like that!?

 

[dextercioby]

I remember solving about 150 ODE-s while preparing an exam on Math.Phys. int he second year.In 3 days...

Daniel.

 

[NateTG]

I did a quarter's worth of Latin homework in one night (three hours I think) once.
A semester's worth of algebra homework (endless equations) in a weekend.
There was a take-home midterem that I did in 5 minutes (took me several hours to do the write up).

 

[Pseudo Statistic]

I sat down for an hour doing 3 Statistics problems.
It was horrible!

 

[trancefishy]

i know what you mean about the writeups. 5 minutes a problem, and a good hour writing it up after that so it looks all pretty and professional, like a mathematician :-)

i don't think I've set any records, but, i have spent long periods of time (8 solid hours, without even peeing) doing a problem once, it was rather vicious as i was stuck and running around it in circles. ack. never again.

 

[mathwonk]

I once worked on the same problem for 5 years, and finally got it. Considering the problem had been implicitly open since 1895, you might consider that fast work.

More recently I have been working toward one related problem, still unsolved, for longer than that.

 

[Eratosthenes]

I remember solving about 150 ODE-s while preparing an exam on Math.Phys. int he second year.In 3 days...

Daniel.

Wow that's 50 problems a day.
I can relate to this because I once did lots of ODE's while studying for a test. I probably did like 30, maybe less, but it took a long time, they are long problems. It makes me feel like a slacker but it also makes me realize I need to study more.

 

[mathwonk]

As a graduate student, I once read over 100 pages of kodaira and morrow's book on complex manifolds, learned sheaf cohomology, and dolbeault cohomology, the basic facts surrounding the laplacian and its variants, harmonic forms, and bochner's inequality, and prepared a complete exposition of the proof of the kodaira vanishing theorem, involving exterior and covariant derivatives, riemannian metrics, chern classes, and curvature forms, in 5 days. Then I presented it in the faculty seminar.

I also played with the baby, helped change his diapers, and ran 4 miles every morning.

 

[Eratosthenes]

As a graduate student, I once read over 100 pages of kodaira and morrow's book on complex manifolds, learned sheaf cohomology, and dolbeault cohomology, the basic facts surrounding the laplacian and its variants, harmonic forms, and bochner's inequality, and prepared a complete exposition of the proof of the kodaira vanishing theorem, involving exterior and covariant derivatives, riemannian metrics, chern classes, and curvature forms, in 5 days. Then I presented it in the faculty seminar.

I also played with the baby, helped change his diapers, and ran 4 miles every morning.

 

[mathwonk]

you do what you have to. and when you have to, believe me, you can really do a lot.

 

[mathwonk]

here's another one for you: once as a teacher i taught all the way through spivak's calculus book in an 8 week summer course, and graded 400 pages of homework per week.

Some of the students told me they were working 8 hours a day on my problem sets.

At the same time i was studying for PhD prelims in the fall.

 

[Eratosthenes]

Sounds like you and your students worked very hard but in the end it's all worth it I think. That is inspiring to say the least.

 

[Muzza]

I once worked on the same problem for 5 years, and finally got it. Considering the problem had been implicitly open since 1895, you might consider that fast work.

Which problem was that?

 

[mathwonk]

it was to compute the degree of a period mapping for certain principally polarized abelian varieties massociated to doubly covered curves, called prym varieties. it had been remarked that this number was finite in 1895, but computing the number had apparently not attracted attention until much later.

the degree of a proper mapping is usually defined as the number of,inverse images or a general point, or of any "regular value". But in practice these values are hard to find, and usually one can only find special values, so I had to create a method for computing the degree from the inverse image of a special value.

and those students who worked 8 hours a day were not average young students, but young returning teachers, who had learned the value of very hard work.

 

[Manchot]

I remember solving about 150 ODE-s while preparing an exam on Math.Phys. int he second year.In 3 days...

Daniel.

Wow, I can't even stand solving more than 5 ODEs in a row for my Diff Eq class. It drives me crazy, although yours may have been ones which weren't just plug and chug. Props goes to you.