Favourite Mathematical Concept/trick? (1 Viewer)

[seanieg89]

pure ftw.

though some aspects of applied are reasonably cool...like game theory.

 

[Carrotsticks]

I was told by someone that for my degree, I could double major.

Thinking of either Pure/Applied Major or Pure/Physics major. It feels so wrong doing all this Math without the Physical applications.

Funny thing is, I never actually did Physics in the HSC because of how much I despised the whole concept of "You get marks for how you answer the question, not the actual answer itself".

Because of this, I'm doing fundies next sem. Not sure if I should do normal, I might get trashed in it considering I would be up against many others who actually did Physics.

It seems like many of the people here have graduated from USYD.

cutemouse, from where did you graduate, if you don't mind me asking?

 

[deterministic]

You must be a very boring person then... (joke) ... You honestly found stuff like the hypothesis test, anova and regression analysis interesting? I didn't. I could do it, but I found it hell boring. The stats department was too lazy to change the exams from last semester too. Of course they didn't give them out, but I knew someone who did the course in the previous semester and so yeah...

If you don't mind me asking, what level of statistics have you done? I agree applying hypothesis tests, finding ANOVA and doing regression is boring, but statistics is much deeper than this (eg. the theories of statistical inference, markov properties and martingales, SDEs) which is actually interesting.

 

[IamBread]

I was told by someone that for my degree, I could double major.

Thinking of either Pure/Applied Major or Pure/Physics major. It feels so wrong doing all this Math without the Physical applications.

I'm hoping that I'l be able to double major in physics/pure. If not, I'll just do as much math as possible and major in physics

 

[math man]

I'm hoping that I'l be able to double major in physics/pure. If not, I'll just do as much math as possible and major in physics

Stats/applied double major for me

 

[hit patel]

Uhhh.. your tastes are not so good....? series and sequences - worst...... The whole Integration Topic = best.

 

[RealiseNothing]

Uhhh.. your tastes are not so good....? series and sequences - worst...... The whole Integration Topic = best.

Soon you'll come to realise they are basically the same thing lol.

 

[seanieg89]

Some things to add:

Concept: Duality in all its forms.

Trick: Integration by parts to control oscillatory integrals, conjugation by the Fourier transform changing differential operators to multiplication operators, continuity/bootstrap arguments.

 

[seanieg89]

Also, how the notion of an invariant can sometimes completely kill a problem:

Consider the following question: Is it possible to tile an 100x100 grid of squares with a pair of opposite diagonal corner squares removed using 2x1 tiles?

Proof by invariants: If we colour the grid like a chessboard, each tile must cover one black square and one white square...but removing two opposite corner squares removes two squares of the same colour. Consequently, there are different numbers of white and black squares on our board, and hence we cannot tile the grid as desired!