Quoting Eugene Salamin <gene_salamin@yahoo.com>:
Which college? Give us a forewarning, so that we can avoid the place. -- Gene
This happened long ago, so the less said the better; things did get sorted out after a while and after a fashion. As an interesting side comment, they had a calculus professor who adamantly opposed df(x)/dx, in favor of D_x f; supposedly to prevent students from cancelling the d's. Poor Leibnitz, who went to such trouble to create an appealing notation. But at least it has stood the test of time. There was a joke (at Newton's expense?) x^(dot) = dx/dt. Cancel the d's in the fraction, cancel the x's from both sides of the equation, and clear the fraction to get t^(dot) = 1, which, amazingly enough, is true. I don't recall who told us that - maybe a Physics professor, or just a myopic small boy who couldn't see emperors' vestiments. It is the sad fate of mathematics to suffer practicioners who never got the point (if there is any). Geometry teachers who won't let the students draw pictures, a recent proposal by some british teachers to drop the quadratic equation from the algebra course because it was "too hard" for the little darlings. As for my problem in retrospect, I think the class was mainly composed of premed students who were more familiar with biology and chemistry than mathematics and physics, and someone probably went complaining to the faculty when a complex number was mentioned. Anyway in a subsequent job we had a seminar presided by a really good statistician from whom I learned about finite differences, heard that exp(k Delta) generated a Newton's series in the style of exp(k d/dx) generating MacLaurin's series, and altogether lost my former loathing of arithmetic and numerical analysis. The teacher really can make a difference! "If Allah places an obstacle in the path of an animal, it is a clear indication that He desires that the animal take another path" -hvm ------------------------------------------------- www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos