Maths dudes: what level of maths is this?

Handsome_Chris

sgosden said:

mrkb said:

i - ah imaginary numbers, the square root of -1.
I did that as part of my BTEC HNC and then my BEng. Ive never used it since, but it had its application in electronics I think.

Yup. Did it all in engineering HNC . Never used it in 8 years of practical engineering. 
It's popped up again now I'm doing degree. 
We all look forward to never using it again. 

FTFY

crunchman

Blaendulais said:

Aside from adding ups take aways and the odd multiplication in 30 years as a doctor i have never really used maths at o level let alone A level.

I liked it but often wonder why the general public need to study it in such depth at school

O level / GCSE isn't a great depth.  Most people don't go beyond that.

That level of understanding is useful at times.  Look at how many people don't seem have any understanding of all the graphs that are constantly being shown about Covid.

It's also the fact that it's teaching you to think and apply yourself to problems.  In a classroom 150 years ago, that might have been translating something from Latin, but either way you are learning to apply your brain to a problem.

Longtallronnie

I'm halfway through an Electrical & Electronic Engineering HNC (distance learning) and the maths has really fecked my brain. 
Thought lockdown would have given me more time to study but if anything it's the opposite - especially before the kids went back to school/nursery. 
Trying to create morphology charts for a tow mount bicycle carrier atm - shoot me. 

monquixote

Just to counter the prevailing feeling I'm a software developer and i constantly wish I knew more maths than the maths A level I have.

sgosden

Longtallronnie said:

I'm halfway through an Electrical & Electronic Engineering HNC (distance learning) and the maths has really fecked my brain. 
Thought lockdown would have given me more time to study but if anything it's the opposite - especially before the kids went back to school/nursery. 
Trying to create morphology charts for a tow mount bicycle carrier atm - shoot me. 

ahaaa that sounds like teeside uni?

Longtallronnie

sgosden said:

Longtallronnie said:

I'm halfway through an Electrical & Electronic Engineering HNC (distance learning) and the maths has really fecked my brain. 
Thought lockdown would have given me more time to study but if anything it's the opposite - especially before the kids went back to school/nursery. 
Trying to create morphology charts for a tow mount bicycle carrier atm - shoot me. 

ahaaa that sounds like teeside uni?

Yep, how do you know that? 

Musicwolf

I don't remember covering it at A level, but then that was sometime in the late eighteenth century and things were different because of the war etc.  Somewhere along the line I learned about i, and j for the non-mathematicians who had embraced the newly discovered electricity, so I’m guessing that was whilst reading Physics at University.  I did use it a little bit when I was in R&D but probably 90% of what I’d studied was of no benefit whilst the relevant bits barely scratched the surface of what I needed to know.

After a few years in R&D I hung up my lab coat (which was tie-dyed) and open toed sandals and moved into the Commercial side of the business.  Here, as in politics, numbers were very important but maths wasn’t.  You had to have the right numbers, but how you achieved them was far less important.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

Just to counter the prevailing feeling I'm a software developer and i constantly wish I knew more maths than the maths A level I have.

I'm a developer too, but with Further Maths and a degree in the bastard stuff.

I'm constantly flipping between "I wish I could remember more of what I studied" and "FFS, I wish I'd taken something more people-centric, because they just confuse me".

mart

If you guys covered complex powers of complex numbers in your A level, then you must have had an over-enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher. The A level syllabus for Further Maths, to my knowledge, has never gone beyond integer powers and n-th roots.

Complex logarithms are, well, complex.

digitalscream

mart said:

If you guys covered complex powers of complex numbers in your A level, then you must have had an over-enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher. The A level syllabus for Further Maths, to my knowledge, has never gone beyond integer powers and n-th roots.

Complex logarithms are, well, complex.

Our pure maths teacher was enthusiasm personified. We basically finished the syllabus 6 months early, and since everyone in the class was going on to do maths at university, he decided to go nuts.

I won't lie, it was basically five months of our heads exploding and one month of him explaining that if we used those things in the exam, we'd probably lose marks.

Just about the only thing I thought was really cool from all of that was synthetic division, for dividing polynomials. It was that "Holy fuck!" moment, where you realise that tons of stuff you've been taught over the years were just special cases of this one simple concept.

WiresDreamDisasters

I got an F in maths, and I use maths and formulas every day.

Oops.

I'm doing 3D development at the moment. Building a set of tools to create 3D geometry straight from code. It's been one of the most interesting projects I've done.

Sincerely though, I do wish I'd paid more attention. Been working my way through a DSP book, and having to learn the magic symbols to tell my brain how to think properly.... it's quite difficult.

mart

digitalscream said:

...
I won't lie, it was basically five months of our heads exploding and one month of him explaining that if we used those things in the exam, we'd probably lose marks.

Sounds like my kind of teaching! 

When my kids were in school and asked any maths question I always gave them the right answer, but then I had to tell them to not to use it in an exam, but to use whatever their teacher had taught them instead. 

That approach seems to have worked, since my son just got a scholarship from his first year doing maths at Oxford. 

HerrMetal

Anyone else still got a copy of Engineering Mathematics by K A Stroud ?  Bonus point for having the Further Engineering Mathematics as well.

stratman3142

HerrMetal said:

Anyone else still got a copy of Engineering Mathematics by K A Stroud ?  Bonus point for having the Further Engineering Mathematics as well.

They're in the nerd section of my book collection. But purchased well after A levels and Uni, apart from the little A level books at the front.

https://i.imgur.com/4ACsCxt.jpg

HerrMetal

Great stuff!

axisus

I got a C for O level maths. Maths wasn't my thing.

Having said that, I am fascinated by the highest levels of maths, my favourite book is 'Fermat's last theorem', and it talks about various maths concepts in an easy to follow way (in no way actually explaining them!). It's a world I wish I could indulge in.

digitalscream

axisus said:

I got a C for O level maths. Maths wasn't my thing.

Having said that, I am fascinated by the highest levels of maths, my favourite book is 'Fermat's last theorem', and it talks about various maths concepts in an easy to follow way (in no way actually explaining them!). It's a world I wish I could indulge in.

That's an interesting one. One of my plans for retirement (hah!) is to try to understand Wiles' solution to Fermat's Conjecture. I very much doubt I ever will, but it should keep me reasonably busy while I'm waiting to depart

stickyfiddle

Wiles went to the same college as me and had some of the same tutors. He was a little bit better than me, mind you. 

I use a lot of logic in my job (project finance for infrastructure) but nothing like uni level maths, which I have literally zero interest in these days. Thank goodness.

jonnyburgo

Jeez, I end up slinging my 13yr old daughters maths homework across the room in frustration, I'm not mathematically inclined...

crunchman

jonnyburgo said:

Jeez, I end up slinging my 13yr old daughters maths homework across the room in frustration, I'm not mathematically inclined...

My 12 year old daughter wants me to help but then doesn't like it when I try to get her to think it through rather than just tell her the answer.

Some of what she is doing at the moment could come in useful later in life though.  She's working out areas, and at the moment she wants to be an interior designer.  Could come in handy when figuring out how much flooring or paint she needs.