Mathematics: All Classes: Friday 20.1.6: 1. period

[charlieeppes.livejournal.com]

Charlie is busy looking over his notes of locker 327. Today would be a good day to volunteer for locker exploration on Saturday. He's sitting by his desk, which is in the front of the room, and the first thing you see when you enter (well, that, and the multiple blackboards and whiteboards). The table of foodness - which today contains danishes, coffee, juice, milk and cereals - is placed on Charlie's left, underneath a blackboard.

The desks are grouped according to classes. There's a group of six tables and chairs for the Beginners, a group of five for the Intermediates and a triangle for the Advanced group. In the back of the room are six computer terminals.


ooc: I realised it would help if the students knew what the room looked like as well...

Advanced:
"Read the chapter on Dimensions and pick a mathematical one to tell me about."

Intermediates:
"Please read the chapter on Numerical weather prediction, and then calculate today's wind chill."

Beginners:
"Look at this list of Mathematical jargons and pick one or two to define for the rest of the class."

Comments

Beginners

[charlieeppes.livejournal.com]

"Look at this list of Mathematical jargons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_jargon) and pick one or two to define for the rest of the class."

Re: Beginners

[cameronmitchell.livejournal.com]

"I'm going to explain handwaving and rigour, because both terms are so related to each other. When the term rigour is used in maths, it's meant to imply that a theory has proved to be sound. Most of the time thanks to the use of axiomas. It does happen that in a theory some details that are of minor importance don't get researched into detail or proven to be mathematically rigorous. In that case we talk about handwaving. The researcher assumes that that particular part of his theory is right, but doesn't bother to actually prove it."

Re: Beginners

[kikidelivers.livejournal.com]

"In logic, there are necessary and sufficient conditions. A necessary condition is one that must be satisfied, for the result to happen. Drinking is necessary to stay alive, but not sufficient; if you drank but did nothing else you would die. A sufficient condition is one that, if it is satisfied, the result is certain to happen. Jumping is sufficient to leave the ground, but not necessary; there are many other ways one can leave the ground instead without doing that."

Re: Beginners

[cyclopeanmerc.livejournal.com]

"The term "if and only if", which is kind of self-explanatory, refers to when one statement is necessary and sufficient for another statement. In other words, if one is true, the other also has to be true.

"Back-of-the-envelope refers to kind of sketchy calculations that are more guesswork than proof, but test or support anyway. Kind of 'rough calculations', I guess."

Re: Beginners

[anole-x.livejournal.com]

"I decided to pick two terms that sounds kinda funny, so you can use them with your friends and make them think you're crazy. The first one is arbitrary, which refers to something done without the use of logic. For example, if you, say, duct tape a golf cart to the Principal's ceiling on a whim, that would be arbitrary. In math, pulling a number out of thin air and using it as the base of an argument would be considered arbitrary.

Aliter is Latin for "otherwise" or "by another way". It's basically used to show an alternate way of doing things, like another way to solve a problem."