Physics IV at Rensselaer Poly in spring of 1969. Professor Resnick was teaching it himself as he was writing the textbook with Professor Halliday at Cal Tech. We got standard printed chapters, chapters copied with x-outs and notes in the margins, mimeograph typed pages with whole sections crossed out with new hand-written text, and finally chapters mimeographed in hand-writing only. Ah - the smell and smearing of the final pages.
The class was packed with us undergrads and the walls lined with physics grad students. Cutting edge stuff - and I passed - and it killed any future ideas of mine in advanced science.
Real Analysis was the class I mentioned earlier. As the math majors in my class were advancing towards our degree, one of the teachers at some point made the remark that Real Analysis and Complex Analysis were sort of the opposite of each other, but went on to say that Real Analysis is the much harder class and when you’re in Complex Analysis and you don’t know the answer just guess i, 0, -1 or 1 and you’ll probably get it right. He was joking, but only half so.
Just for kicks I googled Complex Analysis Answer Key and, maybe, 1 in 10 answers are one of those numbers.
We were required to take a Humanities elective to broaden our horizons outside the sciences so I was looking around for something simple and easy, like an art class. I asked a few friends and one of them - a Business major - suggested the ECON class, assuring me it was “just like Calculus” and would be easy.
Bastard lied to me. I had to work hard for a B. :mad::mad::mad:
Right now I’m studying computer networking and security and it is blatantly obvious that my courses were written, designed, and paid for by Cisco. I love the subject, but teaching it all from the perspective of one company is just wrong.
My algorithms class was taught by Ron Rivest, the “R” in RSA encryption. That was pretty tough. I got an A- and I think my average score on the tests was about 50%.
The only reason I did well was that I was very interested in and cared about the material. I got worse letter grades in other classes, but not because they were harder, just because I didn’t care as much.
I really didn’t care in undergrad so the classes that I had trouble in were generally due to me not caring.
Differential Equations I had an F going into the final with out doing any homework or any class material outside of class then a hot girl on the track team wanted me to teach it to her at the conference finals so we spent the whole meet working on it and I got 100% on the final so the professor gave me a B even though by points I earned an F.
I failed statistics twice, once due to not going to class and just reading my girlfriend’s notes, once due to dropping the class but forgetting to turn in the paperwork and then I switched over to geostatistics and got a A since it was interesting. I took stats again in grad school and got an A. My next round of grad school should be more challenging and I’ll have something to add to this thread.
Grad school Digital Signal Processing. A very demanding envelope-pushing professor going off-text with his own projects and problems, combined with the most noodle-baking mathematics I’ve had to learn. Ended up with a B+ even though it felt like an out-of-control death plunge the entire class.
Electric Fields. If you could match your age on a test score, you got an A in the class. That class was the big weed-out in the EE department.
A close second was Discrete Mathematics when I went back for a Computer Engineering degree. The professor had a hard-on for proofs that went way beyond what the class required.
I took diff e twice. I dreampt of trigonometric substitution. The worst course of Principles of Physical Phenomena. The professor said that it was not a quantum mechanics course. God help me. Heisenberg had written the text book.
It was Statistics for computer scientists for me. Course was engaging, instructor provided real life uses for stats in quality control and discrimination lawsuits, but I could barely wrap my brain around it. Got a total of 65/100 after all the tests, quizzes and homeworks were added up, it ended being recorded as an A- due to the curve. Apparently I was not the only one having a hard time.
The fact that somewhere in the forbidden depths of the Science and Technology building they teach Statistics for statisticians still causes me to wake up covered in cold sweat in the middle of the night sometimes. And its been over a decade.
I just remembered another that might have tied Matrix Methods - it was the only EE course I was required to take (I was an Aero major.) It was some kind of feedback analysis course - bear in mind, this was circa 1978 when CompSci majors still carried around boxes of cards on campus. The class was taught by a grad student who was especially fond of saying “This is so simple, a child of three could do it!” yeah, he was that much of an ass.
Anyway, my lab partner was a geeky EE major who had access to one of the few non-punch-card terminals available on campus, and he knew how to use it. So we discussed the various assignments, with him mostly teaching me the programming side of it and me mostly writing up our reports. Due to the limited number of terminals, we often had to meet in the wee small hours of the morning to get computer time and that led to, well…
After several unsuccessful attempts to optimize one assignment, I said “Just put in pi!” The result was a decidedly phallic printout. That led to a report, written in crayon on kindergarten tablet paper, by “A Child of Three.” Sadly, the reports were due on the last day of class, so we never got them back and never heard anything from him about the crayoned report. But thanks to my partner, I came out of there with a B and the knowledge that I chose well in avoiding EE.
For me it was a maths course in Computability and Complexity - Turing machines, the halting problem, P vs. NP, all the fun stuff like that. The most interesting course I took, but also by far the hardest. Started with about 15 students, ended with two of us.
Optical Signal Processing and Introduction to Holography. It turns out that light can be used to instantly perform some very complex mathematics that takes computers much, much longer, which is what the OSP aspect of the course was about; this class taught why doing this or that with light and lenses results in some given mathematical result - Fourier transform, convolution, autocorrelation, and so on. Along the way, we were taught the fundamental math that explains how a hologram can make light appear to be propagating outward from a particular point in space; once you understand that concept, you can generalize to the idea that a hologram is just a collection of such phantom point sources.
The math on paper, however, was devious. The professor was a stereotypical white-haired madman who began writing equations on the board within seconds after arriving in the classroom, and continued virtually nonstop until the end of each period. Integrals in two dimensions modeling wave propagation, intensity, phase, and what happens to it all under different optical processes. That’s only a few words, and it belies the maddening complexity of what was covered in that course.
Comparative Embryology. Tough course, but absolutely fascinating. I worked like a mule, and did get an A. Really made me understand evolution of vertebrates much better.
Math was actually more of a struggle, since it was not interesting to me, so actually more difficult for me to do well. Didn’t really do well in maths until I had a couple of Physics courses; at that point suddenly math made sense and was much more interesting.
An astrophysics class that blew out most of the math majors; and there I was a lowly education and psych major. I loved it but I had to bust my ass for a “passing - no entry” (rather than a letter grade) just to protect my QPA.
300-level music theory. At this level, it’s mostly analysis of existing works plus writing upper voices to work with a given bass. The instructor was a respected composer, and he expected our compositions to be “beautiful” as well as correct. I was a music history and musicology major, concentrating on several areas that are NOT part of the European common-practice tradition.
Electromagnetic Field Theory - The professor (A genuine WW2 scientist for Germany) lacked the ability to explain anything clearly. My advisor was a also a German scientist who came to the US before the war. He hated the Proff.
Differential Equations - Logic? There’s no logic. Just memorize these 150 different classes of equation families.
When I started my MBA program, the highest math I’d ever taken was pre-calc.
The first semester, one of my two classes was Statistics. It was a graduate level class.
I’d already had doubts about whether I could do this program (I flunked the math portion of the GMAT but they still let me in, citing my work experience) and that first day of class I was furiously taking notes on a funny story the professor was telling us about how the Rothschilds cleaned up during the Napoleonic War because I had NO idea what he was going to test us on.
Then he began the lecture.
I went tharn. (Read Watership Down.)
During the break, I was pacing back and forth outside, eating my banana, thinking I should just go in, shut down my laptop, and go home. I didn’t belong there and I was going to humiliate myself.
Then we broke into our study groups to work on some questions at the back of the book. The first two were easy true/false questions. The third one was a math problem.
I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know how to do this.”
Our engineer and our finance guys in the study group said, “Just solve for zero.”
:smack:
That’s when I realized I didn’t have to do this by myself. I was with a bunch of very smart people who wanted the same thing I did, to learn and grow.
