Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Have I gotten dumber?
I'm teaching Physics 581 (Solid State Physics) this semester for the first time. I'm looking back a lot over the notes I took when I was a student and when I was a TA for the equivalent class at Berkeley. Twice now I've run across work that I did back then, that I don't think I'd be able to do now.
1) One of the problems I solved as a student involved integrating along a two-dimensional curve, as opposed to doing a regular integral which take place along a straight line. No way I'd be able to do that now without serious review! To add insult to injury, that wasn't even a required part of the problem... I just decided to do it for the heck of it, to double-check my previous answer.
2) One of the problems I solved as a TA involved solving a complicated (but more traditional) integral. In the homework solutions I handed out to the class, my notes said: "I could look up this integral in an integral table, but just for kicks, let me solve it by using Laplace transforms." I barely remember what Laplace transforms are now, and I certainly couldn't use any to solve integrals! Mathematica does all my integrals for me now.
On the plus side, I think I do know lots of OTHER things that I didn't know then. :-) But it does make me a little sad to know how much I've forgotten.
As a side note, my old textbook's introduction to the problem referred to in point #2 above, it said, "If you have access to a microcomputer...". Made me laugh!
1) One of the problems I solved as a student involved integrating along a two-dimensional curve, as opposed to doing a regular integral which take place along a straight line. No way I'd be able to do that now without serious review! To add insult to injury, that wasn't even a required part of the problem... I just decided to do it for the heck of it, to double-check my previous answer.
2) One of the problems I solved as a TA involved solving a complicated (but more traditional) integral. In the homework solutions I handed out to the class, my notes said: "I could look up this integral in an integral table, but just for kicks, let me solve it by using Laplace transforms." I barely remember what Laplace transforms are now, and I certainly couldn't use any to solve integrals! Mathematica does all my integrals for me now.
On the plus side, I think I do know lots of OTHER things that I didn't know then. :-) But it does make me a little sad to know how much I've forgotten.
As a side note, my old textbook's introduction to the problem referred to in point #2 above, it said, "If you have access to a microcomputer...". Made me laugh!
# posted by John Colton @ 3:22 PM 
