"Yes dude next to me, I mean you."
Jul. 13th, 2004 06:59 pmThere's this weird guy sitting next to me who earlier, randomly, asked me where I'm from... I didn't know what to do, I decided to humor him and just said New Jersey... then he asked me what my SAT scores were. He seemed to have absolutely no idea that asking random people what their SAT scores are is not something people generally do or that it might be considered at all impolite... at that point of course I didn't answer.
For all I know he's reading this as I write it. I could just move to another computer, but...
(OK, he just left.)
Anyway so Dustin's lecture... it was pretty slow, as he insisted on explaining everything several times over, although a few people actually couldn't follow it anyway. :P He actually did not even finish constructing the hyperreals, so there's going to be a second part some other time.
Early on he put up a chart about the advantages and disadvantages of nonstandard analysis vs your normal epsilon-delta analysis. I copied it down. It was:
Hm... that's really it.
-Sniffnoy
[0]"This is not as opposed to Cauchy, mind you"
[3]There was a little double-headed arrow going between this and "cool".
[4]He didn't leave himself enough room to write "advantage" or "disadvantage".
[5]This one stretched way outside the box...
[6]He didn't say the analog of [0] here because it came later.
[8]Well, originally it said "funky proofs". Then somebody asked, "Why is that a bad thing?" and Dustin said, not that sort of funky, funky like you left it in your refrigerator for too long and now it smells... so he erased "funky" and wrote "rank" instead.
[9]I was the one who insisted he add the "everywhere". It doesn't sound right without it... he also originally didn't have the "mediocre", but then he went and added it.
[10]"Well, maybe if we usually taught nonstandard analysis in college, then *it* would be the bane of mediocre college students everywhere, but we don't, so it isn't."
For all I know he's reading this as I write it. I could just move to another computer, but...
(OK, he just left.)
Anyway so Dustin's lecture... it was pretty slow, as he insisted on explaining everything several times over, although a few people actually couldn't follow it anyway. :P He actually did not even finish constructing the hyperreals, so there's going to be a second part some other time.
Early on he put up a chart about the advantages and disadvantages of nonstandard analysis vs your normal epsilon-delta analysis. I copied it down. It was:
| Robinson | Cauchy | |
| A[4] | -take intuitive proofs and rigorize them -rigorous[0] -cool |
-Doesn't require constructing a new number system[5] -rigorous[6] |
| D[4] | -requires a new number system and takes a while to set up[3] | -nonintuitive -funky proofs[8] -bane of mediocre college students everywhere[9][10] |
Hm... that's really it.
-Sniffnoy
[0]"This is not as opposed to Cauchy, mind you"
[3]There was a little double-headed arrow going between this and "cool".
[4]He didn't leave himself enough room to write "advantage" or "disadvantage".
[5]This one stretched way outside the box...
[6]He didn't say the analog of [0] here because it came later.
[8]Well, originally it said "funky proofs". Then somebody asked, "Why is that a bad thing?" and Dustin said, not that sort of funky, funky like you left it in your refrigerator for too long and now it smells... so he erased "funky" and wrote "rank" instead.
[9]I was the one who insisted he add the "everywhere". It doesn't sound right without it... he also originally didn't have the "mediocre", but then he went and added it.
[10]"Well, maybe if we usually taught nonstandard analysis in college, then *it* would be the bane of mediocre college students everywhere, but we don't, so it isn't."
