Re: Wanted: Lazarus Long rebuttal quote

In rec.arts.sf.written Mike Schilling <mscottschilling@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Michael Stemper wrote:
In article <Q2zoj.1666$xq2.1608@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mike
Schilling writes:
Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

I'd been pretty good at "math" until Calculus. What got me
completely
was the fact that in integrating (iirc) there were perfectly valid
procedures you could apply all day to an equation in trying to
find
its integral, and all of these perfectly valid techniques might
fail
utterly. You had
to develop a sense of what technique to apply, something I did
only
well enough to get through the classes I absolutely had to have..

Are you talking about finding the indefinite integral of a
function?
Yes, that's an art, not a science. Fortuantely, there are tables
where you can look up all the common ones.

Unfortunately, Madison's math department didn't let you bring those
to Calc exams.

Did the exams really give you difficult indefinite integrals? That's
as silly as the trig identities we had to prove in high school, and as
far removed from anything useful or "real".

The last midterm before the final exam in that class had a take-home
component[1] that consisted of 20 indefinite integrals, a few of which
one of the instructors was way too proud of what an unflattering noun
he was being. The one I vividly remember in particular asked one to
integrate a rational function whose denominator was an unfactored
20th-degree polynomial.

Tony
[1] Honor system, by hand[2], uphill both wa...um...consulting only
your text and notes from the class.[3]

[2] Which wasn't much of a restriction in those days, since the only
public computer on campus was a mainframe taking punch cards
for batch jobs, and indefinite integrals were well beyond the
capabilities of scientific calculators.

[3] A few folks didn't adhere to these restrictions and found themselves
in rather severe trouble.
.

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