It’s posturing. Being smart and liking math is uncool, especially for girls. She probably is capable of straight As, but gets Cs and Ds on purpose so her friends don’t accuse her of being a geek.

Oh, please. You’re assuming WAY too much. There are lots of people, like me, who simply have a very tough time with math, even though they are intelligent and accomplished in other subjects. In my case, I grew up during “new math” instruction and I never got an adequate foundation for higher math. I made it through four years of high school math, and even mastered calculus with reasonably good grades, but I never enjoyed it and have avoided it ever since.

Danica McKellar, the actress who was in The Wonder Years, is a math scholar who has made it a priority to help teenage girls overcome their aversion to math. She makes the point that many high school math teachers may be numbers whizzes, but they are not good at patiently teaching concepts that seem simple to them. They also tend to be male and somewhat intimidating to girls.

Of course I’m sure that Hemant is the antithesis of the impatient, scary, male like my ninth-grade algebra teacher.

The good math teachers I’ve had were all after highschool.

Although, I’ve never had a hot math teacher. My *best* math teacher looked a little like a garden gnome minus the hat, and somewhat taller. He was actually quite good.

My geometry teacher was a Russian dude who treated geometry like a court case, except he always said “Guilty until proven innocent” when referring to the proofs– like our proofs were proving something innocent. He was the closest to hot, but mostly ’cause he had a lot of muscles and good posture.

The *WORST* math teacher I ever had was a geometry teacher in highschool and I didn’t understand something and asked her a question about “Why” and she said:

I don’t know, it is in the book

FYI: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html — that’ll let you do math symbols in HTML.

I think that big problem with math courses is that A LOT of teachers and lecturers seem to live in distant galaxy or what. Not many are able to give good examples. I’ll forget anything that doesn’t look usable in any way. Take eigenvalues for example. Heck, I don’t remember Maxwell’s equations, which are among fundamental laws i electrical engineering. I just remember that they describe relationship betveen electric and magnetic fields.

In EE / telecom, anything beyond basic calculus, some complex math bits, matrix operations and basic transforms (Z and Fourier tr.) is IMO barely usable, unless I’m going to do research in RF technologies or materials.

Derek, if you’re doing surface area, you made the same mistake I did. You’ve got to multiply by the square root of 1+(dy/dx)^2 before you integrate. The part under the integral should be:

(2pi*e^-x)sqrt(1+(-e^-x)^2))dx

which is more of a pain than I’m willing to deal with before lunch.

Derek, if you’re doing surface area, you made the same mistake I did. You’ve got to multiply by the square root of 1+(dy/dx)^2 before you integrate. It should be:

?[1..+?](2?9e^-x)sqrt(1+(-e^-x)^2))dx

which is more of a pain than I’m willing to deal with before lunch.

Well, number theory is the basis behind cryptography, so knowing the truth of Riemann Hypothesis has some bearing on how well we make sure that no one steals your credit card number when you order something on Amazon.com (or anywhere else on the internet), as well as how any other secret messages can be sent securely.

I always thought that was just something we wrote at the top of grant proposals without really meaning it… Actually, one application will definitely be generating larger primes more quickly, so we will get slightly-stronger crypto out of it, but without seeing a proof of it, it’s hard to say whether in general it’ll make RSA crypto easier or harder to break. Anyhow, over the next decade or so I think we’re all going to switch over to crypto based on the Elliptic Curve Discrete Log Problem, for which the Riemann Hypothesis will have less importance.

But overall, let’s just remember that negative numbers were vigorously attacked as having no use outside of theoretical mathematics when they were introduced, as were most sets of numbers that we now all know and love. Saying something has no use is just an excuse to ignore it.

=2π/e

… I think. Been a LONG time since I was a college freshman. Math teacher?

Well, that was more fun than I’ve had all week

Quick! What’s the volume of a lathe object around the x-axis defined by e^(-x) from x=1 to positive infinity? How about its surface area? 10 seconds! And show your work.

Volume: pi/2 * e^-2
Surface area: 2*pi*e^-1

If you think I’m going to show my work, think again.

Edit: screwed up my calculation of the surface area. Maybe I should show my work!