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From: William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: (ReacTor) Defining Our Terms: What Do We Mean by "Hard SF"?
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2024 17:07:40 -0400
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Scott Dorsey wrote:
> In article <va6gqd$9366$1@dont-email.me>, Titus G  <noone@nowhere.com> wrote:
>> Fascinating.
>> There was only the one Stage 1 Maths course at the NZ University I
>> attended. It was taken by Science, pre-Medical, Arts... all students and
>> its main purpose was pure maths in preparation for Stage 2.
> 
> Gatech was the same way.  Everybody took a year of engineering calculus and
> memorized the 143 required integrals,

Memorizing integrals?  I can see where it might be useful, but I've 
never heard of such a requirement.


  whether they were psychology, physics,
> or mechanical engineering.  The only people who did not have to take the
> engineering calculus classes were management majors (and football players who
> had their own special major under the school of management).  Even math students
> had to take the things (although they also got a math calculus class later).
> I think this was a terrible idea but it did help reduce student retention which
> was probably the point.
> 
>> I was aware that there were different levels of Statistics at Stage 1,
>> for example, the Arts department had their own course for Economics
>> students but a pass would not qualify you for entry into Stage 2
>> Statistics in the Science department.
> 
> Okay, statistics is weird...  Psych statistics is a crash course in the kind of
> statistics needed for experimental design but without any of the theory behind it.
> No combinatorial stuff, but lots of correlation and Student's T Test.  If you
> are lucky you get some applications stuff that explains when particular measures
> are useful and when they fail, but this is not always the case.
> 
> Math statistics is all proofs as you would expect.  I never took an economics
> stats class but I'd be very interested in the curriculum!
> 
>> And having not considered such things for decades, found this thread
>> diversion fascinating.
> 
> I am still recovering from my experience.  Out here in the real world I have
> not solved anything in closed form in ages.  Wish someone had taught about
> runge-kutta in college (and where the error bounds are).

I deeply wish I'd been taught the same.


Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg!   I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to 
get RKF4 or RKF8 to deal with my equations some time before continental 
drift created a new Pangea.


William Hyde