Okay, so in my Discrete Structures class (which is killing me), I have been spending the entire semester studying math. I get that it's supposed to be mathy, though, so I accept that for what it is. The problem is the caliber of the problems given the class. The average homework assignment takes me four hours and two trips to o
ffice hours. That isn't too bad, but I don't think I'm learning things properly. On the last exam, for example, I got a 50. Out of a hundred. And the class average on the exam was a 50. I would be the type of person to put it all on the professor, but he gave us the option to redo it for half the points we lost, and as I look it back over it seems really simple. For example, the last problem totally stumped me. I just looked at it again, and I could readily see why n*2^(n-1) is equal to the sum of k going from one to n of k C(n,
k). I would format that better, but I don't know how to do so on this. Instead of erasing anything, I'll just go do it in Word and see if I can append it here in that way (starting time 12:37 p.m. EST, let's see how long it takes me to do this in Word).
Well, that took me until 12:51 to do. The new Word makes things hard to find and makes me miss OpenOffice. Ho hum. Anyway, the answer is to use the binomial theorem trickily and then take the derivative of both sides. I won't go into all the details because a) it's boring and b) I'd hate for it to look like I was facilitating plagiarism. Rest assured, though, that it is very provable (laughably so, in fact).
Anyway, there's a really funny show called It Only Hurts When I Laugh, and it's like AFV, but there are more videos that actually make you laugh and people fall down a lot. I like when people fall down, and I don't know why. Look into it. In the mean time, watch this:
3 comments:
I'm a little happy I'm not taking discreet structures :D But I think that equation you showed in your post I learned how to solve my last year of high school, I just don't remember how :P :P Lucky me.
Haha, it's not too bad once you get into it and use the binomial theorem with first y = 1. Then you derive both sides remembering that the derivative of a sum is the sum of the derivatives, and than C(n,k) is a constant multiplier in each iteration and needn't be changed. You then simply let x also equal one and get the final answer.
Pretty fun stuff, I know.
Uhm, I think you should die in a fire (kaji de shine, in japanese) for trying to teach me math.
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