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I was an academic rockstar (the high school Physics lab was named after me for 10 years because I aced the NYS Regents and got a 5 on the AP, first student in the school's history to do so) ...until I was sunk by Calc 192 at Cornell. (TWICE.) Taylor and Maclaurin series is what finally did me in. (They were not "optional" in calc 192.) That and the 8-hour-long problem sets. (Yes, 4 hard questions per problem set would take about 8 hours in total to work out. Buzzkiller.) Know how often I've seen Taylor or Maclaurin series needed in my CS career since? Fucking never. It's pure weed-out material, IMHO.

Also, you got an A in the most efficient way possible in that class, in my opinion. THAT is intelligence in a nutshell! At least on my IQ ruler, lol

The fact that people think academic success is only a function of effort and grades is indicative of schools failing their stated goal of education.

I guess success depends on your goals. If you just want that degree so that you can go out and get a job as fast as possible, then by all means. If you really want to learn everything the school has to offer to enrich yourself, then you can do that too. If you're paying for it, and you get what you want out of it, I don't really see a problem either way.

Obviously you've never done any fluid dynamics. I remember thinking Taylor series were stupid too, until I got into upper division meteorology courses. It's pretty much all we do, because hey, our initial conditions have most of the error. Taylor series are super important to numerical modeling. You may not have come across it in the wild, but I assure you many FORTRAN hackers have.

Sort of an "out there" question: Fluid dynamics sounds interesting. Is there any, eh, "fun, interactive" fluid dynamics simulation thing I could check out? Basically, playing with someone else's model instead of modeling things myself

Sorry, can't think of anything offhand. While I did go to graduate school for atmospheric science, I've been out of the field for ten years now.

What did you end up doing (so far)?

Lately, programming for a company that does online surveys. It's not glamorous, but it is data analysis and intellectually challenging enough. Other than that, I've worked on the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. I help run a nonprofit wiki farm at miraheze.org, where I'm the security specialist. And I'm getting sidetracked in politics once again.

Too many side projects means I wasn't really focused enough to get a graduate degree, but hey, you have to live life as you want, and go after the things that make you happy.

When I was there, we did Taylor in MATH 1910 and then MATH 1920 was multivariable + vector calculus.

Is that a separate course or did they renumber the courses since I've been there?

They are separate courses. I didn't have any AP Calculus credits so I had to take both.

At some point (I think a few years before 2008?), Cornell also renumbered the courses by adding an extra zero to convert them to four digits (as required by the new PeopleSoft course management system).

I had a REALLY hard time in MATH 1910. A lot of people came in with private school educations and breezed right through it all. Meanwhile, I felt like I was struggling to catch up on the very basics such as L'Hôpital's rule because my high school was just okay but not great.

I started with a B- after the first prelim (which was the median grade), had to go to tutoring at the Math Support Center in Mallott and go to office hours, and after all that, I managed to somehow bring up my grade to an A- by the end of semester. Even still, it was VERY stressful.

I wonder how you must have handled having to retake the class. I would've been losing my mind from anxiety if that happened.

I have a kinda similar story. I've always had the ability to learn something really, really quickly. Like 4-8 hours I could learn almost any technical course. Calculus was different though. You couldn't just learn how to visualize things and learn the rules and apply them. Integration couldn't be "flow charted" you had to just recognize the pattern!

So I'm up all night before the final trying to get through this material. Then I hit the Taylor and Maclaurin method of turning every function into a polynomial. It was difficult to learn, but at least it was straightforward once you got the trick of it.

Due to coffee related stomach sickness the final was rescheduled anyway so I learned a good deal of the patterns for the integration but what I ended up doing was using Taylor series if I got stuck since I could just convert it to polynomials, do the integration, then try to convert the infinite series back into a reasonable looking function. If not, no worries, it's still technically the same function so maybe I lose a few points here or there, better than nothing.

Oh and there was a bomb threat during that retake. I made sure to walk right next to the prof while the other 8 people writing with me held back and essentially cheated. I asked the prof why he was letting them do it and he said "Oh, I'm just going to deduct 15% from everyone's exam but yours".

Really dodged a bullet there, lol. Kinda miss university at times.

> by skipping class I didn't know the final was rescheduled!

Made a similar mistake. I showed up to an Astronomy final... 2 hours late by mistake! Prof hands me the test and says you have 20 mins to finish. Somehow I scored an A. Pure miracle.