Gems from Math Lecture
February 10, 2005 – 10:37 pmI am taking a math course this term from a professor who taught one term of another math course I took last year. This particular professor is _very_ entertaining, which makes the math lectures significantly less boring. Every now and then, he says something that I find simply priceless. It has happened enough times that I have made the effort of writing down what he says when I find something particularly enjoyable. I have two examples. Here is one of them.
At one point this past Tuesday, the professor was talking about a system of linear ordinary differential equations written in the form
where A(t) is a T-periodic nxn matrix. So, this system of equations has periodic coefficients. The professor then asks, rhetorically, whether this means that solutions of this system of equations will also be periodic. “No!”, he answers emphatically. “Look at this example.”
“Nothing could be less periodic!”, he declares. Priceless. (Granted, it’s much funnier when you’re sitting in class and this event breaks the monotony of taking several pages of notes.)
2 Responses to “Gems from Math Lecture”
I think its funny, Jeff.
By Michael Griebe on Feb 14, 2005 at 5:06 pm
Thank goodness. That post was one of those situations where I type it thinking about how funny it was, and then when I reread it, I realize it may be totally lame. It’s hard to appreciate how much of the humor comes from the moment, but I thought it was a gem nonetheless. I’ll have to post the other example I’ve written down soon.
By jjk on Feb 14, 2005 at 10:29 pm