I Just Stopped Grinning

... because it is the week before finals, a week appropriately termed "Dead Week." It is rainy and gloomy, and studies hang over students' heads like dark, ominous clouds. But with gritted teeth I forge onward, with the knowledge that the light at the end of the tunnel of my freshman year is just a week and two days hike from where I stand. This darkness of small hard things is a necessary disgruntlement before the pleasantries of the summer. Keep smiling, students!

My head is currently swarming with thoughts of first and second order linear differential equations, homogeneous and nonhomogeneous thereof, theorems of existence and uniqueness, of complex roots and multiple eigenvalues, of laPlace transforms and principles of linear superposition and linear operators, of Gaussian elimination and polynomial least squares regression... *Shudder.* Coincidentally, my brain is also trying to process the three laws of thermodynamics, isobaric and isochoric processes, internal energy and whether work is positive or negative, and a whole slew of other stuff pertaining to physics. I just mentioned .02% of what I dream about at night.

Final Examination... that phrase sends shudders up my spine.

Back to Baby Math

It's rather funny: the higher up in mathematics you go, you often revisit "duh" topics, usually to illustrate a point. Today, in my diffy q's class, copied from the blackboard verbatim, was written this:

a + x = b
-a + (a + x) = -a + b
(-a + a) + x = -a + b
0 + x = -a + b
x = b - a

ax = b
a^-1(ax) = a^-1b
(a^-1a)x = a^-1b
1x = a^-1b
x = b/a

I was chuckling inside as my professor explained about opposites and inverses and associative properties, etc.

Despite this seemingly easy revisitation to 7th grade math, this course is very difficult. Right now we're learning how to solve systems of nonhomogeneous higher order differential equations. My head is swimming with linear operators, matrix multipliers, LaPlace transforms, and superposition.

Come March 10th, I will fall into a deep sleep for 10 days.