I note from the sunday times that it is now proposed that there should
be an easier maths A level.

It will have no calculus, and have statistics and 'use of spreadsheets'
instead.

Obviously someone has failed to notice that A level maths already has a
whole bunch of statistics modules. They are grouped pure, mechanics and
statistics right now.

As to 'use of spreadsheets', well that'll be a tough one, won't it?

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
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Gordon Couger writes

Computers do away with the need for some calculus. You can just work it out
the long way.

Sure, and that's true of many real life problems.
However if you don't understand the concept of calculus then you are
doing it by rote. Further it's easy to simplify and find an analytic
solution that should be close to the answer to check that your result
looks plausible.

One engineer was trying to find the volume of a stream
profiles at different levels with a computer program. That is a classic area
under a curve problem and she couldn't covert it to code. Since the data was
on a X, Y data it was all straight lines. Each section of the stream could
just be solve using the area of a triangle added to the are of he rectangle
above it. When summed up in a recursive function it took about a half page
of code and a hour to show her how to do it.

Indeed. The very same method that, taken to the limit, is used to prove
integration.

Hmm, I can't quite see why recursion is needed if I understand the
problem as stated.

I doubt she understood recursion but she did get the point about simplifying
the problem.

Quite. Mindless following by rote using tools you don't understand often
results in someone getting cut.

For an engineer anything difficult enough to require calculus has a look up
table anyway

In 8 years of solving problems for engineers I never used calculus once.
Maybe they could solve the ones that needed calculus and just brought me the
hard ones.

It's more than that, often. Frequently simple calculus is used to
generate the basic cell, which is then used numerically for the real
(and thus often tedious, analytically) life problem.

--
Oz
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"Oz" wrote in message
...
Mind you it is a moot point how many technocrats we actually need.
Very, very, few end up doing research. Most end up in industry (and
there is not much of that left), often as a glorified maintenance man
(nothing wrong with that) and only rarely actually designing something.

Even more go into management or 'financial services'. Pretty lucrative
and often interesting. Some into teaching, even fewer as a vocation.

It's worth remembering that in the 60's only about 2% of the children
leaving school went to university and well under half of those did
sciences. Many of those went into teaching and a tiny number into
academia.


yes but in the 50s and 60s no one bothered too much about public
acceptability of scientific advance. Now everything gets howled down by semi
educated witch burners

Jim Webster

Jim Webster writes
"Oz" wrote in message
...
Mind you it is a moot point how many technocrats we actually need.
Very, very, few end up doing research. Most end up in industry (and
there is not much of that left), often as a glorified maintenance man
(nothing wrong with that) and only rarely actually designing something.

Even more go into management or 'financial services'. Pretty lucrative
and often interesting. Some into teaching, even fewer as a vocation.

It's worth remembering that in the 60's only about 2% of the children
leaving school went to university and well under half of those did
sciences. Many of those went into teaching and a tiny number into
academia.


yes but in the 50s and 60s no one bothered too much about public
acceptability of scientific advance. Now everything gets howled down by semi
educated witch burners

Good point. Half of them demanding instant cures and the other half
(possibly including a subset of the first half), busily preventing them
using the tools required to do the job.

Simultaneously they are berated for not doing the impossible.

Hmm, bit like farmer's really. Someone obviously has it in for me.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

"Oz" wrote in message
...

I note from the sunday times that it is now proposed that there should
be an easier maths A level.

It will have no calculus, and have statistics and 'use of spreadsheets'
instead.

Obviously someone has failed to notice that A level maths already has a
whole bunch of statistics modules. They are grouped pure, mechanics and
statistics right now.

As to 'use of spreadsheets', well that'll be a tough one, won't it?

especially if they made them use them in a power cut with limited battery
time

Jim Webster


--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

"Oz" wrote in message
...

I note from the sunday times that it is now proposed that there should

As to 'use of spreadsheets', well that'll be a tough one, won't it?



We have a mathematician at work who solves every problem as a
spreadsheet,
the maths behind some of the cells could be considered "challenging" in
anyone's money.

Hämisch Macbeth writes
"Oz" wrote in message
...

I note from the sunday times that it is now proposed that there should

As to 'use of spreadsheets', well that'll be a tough one, won't it?


We have a mathematician at work who solves every problem as a
spreadsheet,
the maths behind some of the cells could be considered "challenging" in
anyone's money.

I rather doubt a level that considers calculus 'too hard' is going to
have 'challenging' spreadsheet modelmaking.

Simple calculus is hardly difficult, it's 300 years old and involves
little more than slopes and areas under graphs.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

Computers do away with the need for some calculus. You can just work it
out
the long way.

Sure, and that's true of many real life problems.
However if you don't understand the concept of calculus then you are
doing it by rote. Further it's easy to simplify and find an analytic
solution that should be close to the answer to check that your result
looks plausible.

One engineer was trying to find the volume of a stream
profiles at different levels with a computer program. That is a classic
area
under a curve problem and she couldn't covert it to code. Since the data
was
on a X, Y data it was all straight lines. Each section of the stream
could
just be solve using the area of a triangle added to the are of he
rectangle
above it. When summed up in a recursive function it took about a half
page
of code and a hour to show her how to do it.

Indeed. The very same method that, taken to the limit, is used to prove
integration.

Hmm, I can't quite see why recursion is needed if I understand the
problem as stated.

A recurcusive soluouton that goes all the way throught to the other side of
the channel calulates the avergate and returns the area and return the area
to the incantaion that called where it is summed wiht the area of that
incantation and so on until the function fails back to the point it return
the area in the stream. It is all done with volitile variables and no house
keeping.

There was a chanle and they want to fill it with number of levels of water
and I could resue it without any dependance or effect outside the function
its self. We had a lot of that kind of data and it could drop in anywhere
with no side effects.

I doubt she understood recursion but she did get the point about
simplifying
the problem.

Quite. Mindless following by rote using tools you don't understand often
results in someone getting cut.

For an engineer anything difficult enough to require calculus has a look
up
table anyway

In 8 years of solving problems for engineers I never used calculus once.
Maybe they could solve the ones that needed calculus and just brought me
the
hard ones.

It's more than that, often. Frequently simple calculus is used to
generate the basic cell, which is then used numerically for the real
(and thus often tedious, analytically) life problem.

I set in on a course on open channel flow that the first words were you all
know what vector is 6 of them define a point in space, 3 of those can be
discarded because they are a mirror image of the other three and that is
called a tensor and tensor will be noted this way. Then he spent six weeks
defining a term u* then the math got hairy describing turbulent flow.

Anytime I needed a complex function on a computer I reduced it to a look up
table if at all possible because speed was always a problem. I have
algorithms for integer square roots, fixed point trig functions and a host
of other math tricks many that avoided division because of all the machine
cycles it uses. These are for working on micro controllers that run at 2
MHz. The biggest use of them if for engine controller in automobiles.

Of course the resolution of the data the computer reads is low and the
granularity of its actions so course crude approximation of many trig
functions and such work in many cases. Complex high resolution functions are
useless when you out put choices are limited to 16.

Gordon

Gordon

Gordon Couger writes
A recurcusive soluouton that goes all the way throught to the other side of
the channel calulates the avergate and returns the area and return the area
to the incantaion that called where it is summed wiht the area of that
incantation and so on until the function fails back to the point it return
the area in the stream. It is all done with volitile variables and no house
keeping.

yes, but you has the x-y data so calculating the area is a simple
simpson's rule. NO recursion.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes
A recurcusive soluouton that goes all the way throught to the other side
of
the channel calulates the avergate and returns the area and return the
area
to the incantaion that called where it is summed wiht the area of that
incantation and so on until the function fails back to the point it
return
the area in the stream. It is all done with volitile variables and no
house
keeping.

yes, but you has the x-y data so calculating the area is a simple
simpson's rule. NO recursion.

As I recall she ask for help and I looked at what she had and solved the
problem with out thinking much about it. I saw triangles and rectangles and
summed them up. I used recursion because I was in the middle of a hydrology
problem that I was solving recursively and it was the method that came to
mind. This was something we did one afternoon after coffee. She had a
problem and I made it go away.

She needed the areas not the best way to find the areas. My job was to make
things work not to teach theory.

I even got one of those hacks published. Entomology was studying tick
response to CO2 at 55 f and using our walk in cooler. They couldn't get the
CO2 and air mix right and I wrote a program to pulse width modulate the CO2
valve using printer port of the laptop that the were using to record data
with and they published the program along with the paper.

Gordon

Gordon Couger writes

Oz:
yes, but you has the x-y data so calculating the area is a simple
simpson's rule. NO recursion.

As I recall she ask for help and I looked at what she had and solved the
problem with out thinking much about it. I saw triangles and rectangles and
summed them up. I used recursion because I was in the middle of a hydrology
problem that I was solving recursively and it was the method that came to
mind. This was something we did one afternoon after coffee. She had a
problem and I made it go away.

Sounds like maths education is a problem in the states, too.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

Oz:
yes, but you has the x-y data so calculating the area is a simple
simpson's rule. NO recursion.

As I recall she ask for help and I looked at what she had and solved the
problem with out thinking much about it. I saw triangles and rectangles
and
summed them up. I used recursion because I was in the middle of a
hydrology
problem that I was solving recursively and it was the method that came to
mind. This was something we did one afternoon after coffee. She had a
problem and I made it go away.

Sounds like maths education is a problem in the states, too.

Turning math into a computer algorithm is not always straight forward. It
wasn't a math problem it was a computer programming problem,

Gordon

Gordon Couger writes
"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

Oz:
yes, but you has the x-y data so calculating the area is a simple
simpson's rule. NO recursion.

As I recall she ask for help and I looked at what she had and solved the
problem with out thinking much about it. I saw triangles and rectangles
and
summed them up. I used recursion because I was in the middle of a
hydrology
problem that I was solving recursively and it was the method that came to
mind. This was something we did one afternoon after coffee. She had a
problem and I made it go away.

Sounds like maths education is a problem in the states, too.

Turning math into a computer algorithm is not always straight forward. It
wasn't a math problem it was a computer programming problem,

Hmmm.

Usually the maths bit of a program is the easiest and quickest bit.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes
"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

Oz:
yes, but you has the x-y data so calculating the area is a simple
simpson's rule. NO recursion.

As I recall she ask for help and I looked at what she had and solved
the
problem with out thinking much about it. I saw triangles and
rectangles
and
summed them up. I used recursion because I was in the middle of a
hydrology
problem that I was solving recursively and it was the method that came
to
mind. This was something we did one afternoon after coffee. She had a
problem and I made it go away.

Sounds like maths education is a problem in the states, too.

Turning math into a computer algorithm is not always straight forward. It
wasn't a math problem it was a computer programming problem,

Hmmm.

Usually the maths bit of a program is the easiest and quickest bit.

It usualy is. But converting calculus in to code is not always straight
forward. Many time if you are working with a special case such as all
triangles and rectangles there is a simpler way than implementing the
solution for all cases.

Had it been a different day I may well have come up with a different
solution. She explained the problem I saw a simple way to solve it and I
did. Had I been working on something else I might have come up with a
different solution.

Gordon