About two decades ago, Marty Wattenberg was carrying Jacobsen’s Basic Algebra across campus (Brown?) and ran into someone who noted it and said, “Oh, are you having trouble with Algebra? Maybe I can help… I’m good at that…” so Marty opened the book and said, “Oh, thank you, I’m having trouble with” (I don’t remember the detail here so I’ll guesstimate) “decomposition of projective modules. Can you help me with this theorem?”
What is really damning is when they actually did take graduate school level Algebra in high school and you just have to crumble before their feet. But! It’s much more common that they just did arithmetic and a little bit of polynomial stuff, which for some mysterious reason was called “math”, so for the most part we’re safe.
What is really damning is when they actually did take graduate school level Algebra in high school and you just have to crumble before their feet. But! It’s much more common that they just did arithmetic and a little bit of polynomial stuff, which for some mysterious reason was called “math”, so for the most part we’re safe.
A few days ago on StumbleUpon I found a page with “free high school math help” (because apparently when I say mathematics they decide I’m in high school).
It linked to MIT’s OpenCourseWare on senior/graduate-level algebra and geometry courses. THAT was a riot to guess what the fallout would be.
Grad student I went to school with had the convenience of taking algebra in the same classroom he taught algebra, back to back. One day his student razzed him about him still being in algebra (seeing ihs copy of Lang), so he offered to let them do his homework in lieu of their quiz… Needless to say, after only one problem statement, they chose to go back to their normal subject matter.
Amen.
The best is when they say “Oh…I hated that in high school…it was really hard” and you want to say “That was trivial you idiot”
So true.
About two decades ago, Marty Wattenberg was carrying Jacobsen’s Basic Algebra across campus (Brown?) and ran into someone who noted it and said, “Oh, are you having trouble with Algebra? Maybe I can help… I’m good at that…” so Marty opened the book and said, “Oh, thank you, I’m having trouble with” (I don’t remember the detail here so I’ll guesstimate) “decomposition of projective modules. Can you help me with this theorem?”
…and the look on the would-be helper’s face was somewhere between horror and “that’s NOT algebra, there aren’t even any numbers!”
(world) -> (world)/(suffering)
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
What is really damning is when they actually did take graduate school level Algebra in high school and you just have to crumble before their feet. But! It’s much more common that they just did arithmetic and a little bit of polynomial stuff, which for some mysterious reason was called “math”, so for the most part we’re safe.
What is really damning is when they actually did take graduate school level Algebra in high school and you just have to crumble before their feet. But! It’s much more common that they just did arithmetic and a little bit of polynomial stuff, which for some mysterious reason was called “math”, so for the most part we’re safe.
A few days ago on StumbleUpon I found a page with “free high school math help” (because apparently when I say mathematics they decide I’m in high school).
It linked to MIT’s OpenCourseWare on senior/graduate-level algebra and geometry courses. THAT was a riot to guess what the fallout would be.
Seems like this is poking fun at me since I failed algebra twice in college :-(
Grad student I went to school with had the convenience of taking algebra in the same classroom he taught algebra, back to back. One day his student razzed him about him still being in algebra (seeing ihs copy of Lang), so he offered to let them do his homework in lieu of their quiz… Needless to say, after only one problem statement, they chose to go back to their normal subject matter.
Then again, at some point, the browd I ran with decided that:
algebra:Algebra::Algebra:Categories
Which just goes to show… We woefully underestimated category theory.