Be lazy – like a mathematician

I’ve lost hours this week, for a couple of reasons:

1. sloppy maths
2. too strict maths

Let’s take the first point. In the course assignments there’s so much maths to do with integrations and differentiations to find various aspects of a particle. Perhaps it doesn’t help that I was working on a iPad with my fat fingers trying to type in LaTex representations of functions, but so many time I’ve missed carrying a minus sign across, or some other sloppy error creeps in. It’s frustrating.

Then there are times I’ve lost hours because I’ve tried to be too precise; which in all honestly likely contributes to the first problem, and certainly isn’t helped by it! For example, I didn’t spot that would always result in 0. Then I spent ages integrating a term that included it twice, leading to an exploding expression.

I forget how mathematicians aim to be lazy and get rid of things as soon as they can.

But I did have the insight that the answer to a normalisation coefficient is unlikely to be as complicate as, say, . So once I started getting into that level of complexity, it was time to stop, delete, get back to an easier state, and start again.

My hatred of the maths earlier in the course is starting to turn into comfortable acceptance – after all, to do quantum mechanics means a need to do such maths, and so repetitive practice is, in the long run, a good thing.

….just wish I hadn’t a 30+ year gap between last doing it and now!

On a side note, I now own a lovely midnight blue MacBook Air M3 – and even got the student discount on it; nice.