Regular reminder to self
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Regular reminder to self
@shana when I was doing the maths parts of my degree, I very quickly realised that maths notation is the problem with why maths is difficult.
Borring from the field of computer science to remove all the greek characters that often have multiple uses [1] and rename operators with descriptors could make it way more accessible.
[1] Okay this is mainly astrophysics's fault that one equation used sigma in both cases for three different things.
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@shana not really for loops. In math a sum can and often does go up to infinity, whereas a for loop cannot do that.
As an analogy to convey some information is fine, I'm just reminding that it ain't the same thing.
@nyx Super nitpickity, if you don't have a stop condition, a for-loop will happily go on until the death of the universe (or your pc, whichever comes first)
But in general, the sigma is the abstract definition, the for-loop is a possible concrete implementation of that definition, in a language that the target of this PSA (non mathy programmers) can understand and go "oooh ok I get it now". It would have saved me like half a semester if someone had shown me this up front, no other words needed.
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@shana that, and equations over planes also implicitly translate into loops over each value of the plane
that's basically what made maths finally click for me@xerz If only someone had just put a couple of for-loops as footnotes in my school texts! It would have been such a time saver.
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@hjvt hey, why have one for-loop when you can have Parallel.ForEach() and turn *all* your cpu cores into one toasty personal heating unit!
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@shana when I was doing the maths parts of my degree, I very quickly realised that maths notation is the problem with why maths is difficult.
Borring from the field of computer science to remove all the greek characters that often have multiple uses [1] and rename operators with descriptors could make it way more accessible.
[1] Okay this is mainly astrophysics's fault that one equation used sigma in both cases for three different things.
@tautology That might have been why my high school math teacher made me promise I would not go into maths in exchange for a passing grade.
I ended up in computers instead which totally has no maths whatsoever!
(in hindsight, not the best maths teacher)
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Regular reminder to self
@shana Please tell mathematicians to write fewer infinite loops -.-
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@shana Please tell mathematicians to write fewer infinite loops -.-
@jupiter for (sum=0, k=0;;k++) sum+=pow(a*r,k)
Now if you had left the starting index out of the notation, that would have been a stumper
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@nyx Super nitpickity, if you don't have a stop condition, a for-loop will happily go on until the death of the universe (or your pc, whichever comes first)
But in general, the sigma is the abstract definition, the for-loop is a possible concrete implementation of that definition, in a language that the target of this PSA (non mathy programmers) can understand and go "oooh ok I get it now". It would have saved me like half a semester if someone had shown me this up front, no other words needed.
@nyx@lgbtqia.space @shana@mastodon.gamedev.place You just cant calculate the result of the infinite sum notation ^^
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@nyx@lgbtqia.space @shana@mastodon.gamedev.place You just cant calculate the result of the infinite sum notation ^^
@nyovaya @nyx Of course, that's neither the point of the infinite summation nor the point of the translation of the math notation into the for-loop.
The point is that there is a translation from the notation to a computer language format that allows a person not versed in maths to understand the underlying concept of the math notation in an intuitive way, as a starting point. If you can't understand what sigma does at its most basic, you cannot understand its actual math purpose as a whole.
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@jupiter for (sum=0, k=0;;k++) sum+=pow(a*r,k)
Now if you had left the starting index out of the notation, that would have been a stumper
@shana Well the problem with this is, the series may or may not converge.
But the program does not terminate.
So the program cannot answer *either*, so it's not "just a for loop"
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@shana Well the problem with this is, the series may or may not converge.
But the program does not terminate.
So the program cannot answer *either*, so it's not "just a for loop"
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I can be as nitpicky as you like, and point out that the sigma also lacks information on the stopping conditions, and it is only by unspoken shared understanding that mathematicians agree on what the infinite summation is doing/what information they're getting out of it, and you can encode that unspoken shared understanding in the for-loop by coding up a stop condition when a convergence is detected.
But, again, not the point of Freya's original point, nor of my posting of it.
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@tautology That might have been why my high school math teacher made me promise I would not go into maths in exchange for a passing grade.
I ended up in computers instead which totally has no maths whatsoever!
(in hindsight, not the best maths teacher)
@shana Mine told me outright that I would fail A-level math[s] (in the UK, the exam you take at 18 before you leave school).
More fool him: I scraped a decent grade and have now (decades later) done math[s] modules at degree level.
Unless, that was his plan all along, to try and shame me into putting some effort in?
