Where is balance Academic priorities 258

Steve Richfie1d

Here's a key point:

If you're at all interested in this stuff, then you don't wait for somebody to teach you whatever you need, or would like to know:

Instead you explore, and in my case, discover RK and Taylor series while reading my father's university textbooks.

I can still (30 years later!) remember the feeling of power I got from grokking Taylor and realizing that I could now, modulo not having a computer to do the actual drudge work, calculate any trancendental function.

Yeah, I know that spending a lot of physics clbuttes (which were quite boring because they didn't ever teach me anything new) manually calculating 20+ digits of pi using the Taylor series for arctan were sort of worthless, but otoh, I have never regretted learning anything.

In the current context of math vs arithmetic and mental calculation, I feel certain that having spent a lot of time on stuff like this do give me a big advantage when trying to spot stupid mistakes like misplaced decimal points, sums that don't add up etc.

One example is that I find it impossible to watch a presentation with any kind of graph or numbers on it, without automatically checking that they seem reasonable. It is very sad how often they do not, and how often noone else have ever noticed. :-(

Terje

-- "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"