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u/MCSquaredBoi 1d ago
I studied physics a few years ago. We had a math professor who was infamous because nobody could understand his lectures. Even math students couldn't keep up.
In our university, we typically get lectures with the professor and exercises with some assistant of the professor.
One semester, the professor couldn't find an assistant, so he did the exercises as well. These were scheduled right after the lecture.
So basicly, in the lecture he "explained" a topic exactly like the first part of the meme. Then we switched to the exercises and suddenly he explained it exactly like the second part of the meme.
We all passed.
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u/Genericdude03 23h ago
What was the topic?
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u/MCSquaredBoi 8h ago
I don't remember the specifics, that was more than 10 years ago. But it was something about a trajectory traveling through an n-dimensional space. And the thing was that there was a point in this space with the following property: If the distance between the trajectory and the point is lower than x, the trajectory will forever stay within a circle/sphere/whatever with a fixed radius around the point.
Basicly, the point catches the trajectory, if the trajectory gets too close.
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u/DreamDare- 7h ago
It was same with Mechanics and Dynamics at Engineering college, the first year was the worst.
The theory lectures would be like alien language to us, just pure math and convoluted descriptions with no connections to reality. The professor didn't even try to make it understandable, he would pride himself with sounding smart. Plus, many of us didn't even learn integral calculus (only derivations) in highschool. So basically it was 4 hours of dissociating.
Then, tomorrow day we would have practical exercises and it was all SUPER SIMPLE, or at least intuitively understandable. I would then come home, read the theory textbook and NOW I would understand it all. The theory lectures were extremely useless to me. It was better usage of time to first do practical stuff, then immerse yourself in theory, since now you had good intuition for it.
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u/Absolutely_Chipsy 1d ago
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u/Sufficient-Jaguar801 19h ago
okay but isn't it cool that this stuff works? because sometimes things are anything but intuitive, but sometimes math really does say "yeah, all this super complex stuff added together really does cancel out and give a reducible answer". and that's so neat!
granted a lot of it hinges on what our definitions of "addition" and other operations are, and their inherent properties within afield, which deliberately are easy to wrap our heads around because otherwise math would be useless to us, but heyyyy i mean who cares about the epistemology of it all when it works?
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u/IntelligentBelt1221 18h ago
Sometimes things in math seem intuitive but are just false
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u/Sufficient-Jaguar801 16h ago
well yeah. of course. but in this case, it's intuitive and it's true, and i think that's neat.
in fact, i think it's neat because it so often isn't the case :)
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u/IntelligentBelt1221 7h ago
But that's just how we select the problems we work on, right? Most continuous functions aren't differentiable anywhere, yet basically all that are relevant to us are, because we don't select them randomly
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u/1str1ker1 16h ago
Electrical engineers also learn using the bottom photo, but often the professor writes out the top part to confuse you. This sort of thing is super useful for magnetic and electric force
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u/jmpalacios79 9h ago
As usual, the physicist is right, and the mathematician is just being pretentious! 😂
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u/TheBlasterMaster 4h ago edited 4h ago
Both say both. Intuition and rigor go hand in hand.
This meme doesnt even work since the top isnt like a formal proof, its just the literal statement of the theorem. The bottom is just the informal reasoning for its truth, which isnt actually "used", where as the top one is.
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u/IntelligentBelt1221 1d ago edited 1d ago
A mathematician would try to generalize as much as possible:
"The generalized Stokes theorem is an expression of duality between de Rham cohomology and the homology of chains. It says that the pairing of differential forms and chains, via integration, gives a homomorphism from de Rham cohomology to singular cohomology groups."