Re: Thomas Covenant series


Joy Beeson wrote:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 04:20:40 GMT, Sea Wasp
<seawaspobvious@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Strange. Calculus was EASIER than some of the math that came before
it for me. I ended DiffyQ with an average greater than 100%.

The first semester, differential calculus, was easy.

The second semester, integral calculus, was easy.

But I STILL don't understand how one is the inverse of the other.

And it was half a century ago, so I'd have to start over from scratch
if I tried to understand it now.

I realise I'm the only one still banging on about this, but it's been
nagging at me. It's important to me because I have at stake that
difficult ideas can be communicated (I'm sure I'm not alone). I
finally thought of a way of demonstrating that integration is the
inverse of differentation in a way that any writer would (so goes my
theory) find accessible, even ones that hate maths. Here we go:

So, you have a WIP which has a wordcount which (hopefully) grows over
time. You keep a track of the length of your WIP (perhaps in excel).

You find your daily writing _rate_ by differentiation: You take the
/difference/ between today's wordcount and yesterday's wordcount.

If you integrate what you have differentiated, i.e. add up all your
daily rates, you get back your original thing: your wordcount.

Thus integration is the inverse of differentiation.

Wordcount isn't a continuous function, but the process is conceptually
the same, and calculus just takes the limit of your interval (in this
case a 'day') down to zero.

.

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