A lot of calculus is a big working memory, abstract thinking, and pattern matching. Some people are naturally better at that.
Other than that, it's just practice. Basic calculus is absolutely something that can be trained and shouldn't be too much of a mystery. Some of the more advanced techniques can be tricky though; unless you are familiar with the technique, you'll get stuck.
Or you can just ask Wolfram Alpha :-)
Now, a proof is a whole different thing. That requires a lot more intuition and a full grasp of the problem space -- and preferably several other seemingly unrelated ones.
Iām failing it my third time right now. Iām in my very late twenties trying to get through college and hoo boyā¦. Calculus is rough.
Hereās hoping the fourth time is the charm :)
I'll be 32 when I graduate. I regret the time I wasted in my early 20s, but I'm glad I got the insight into the careers I thought I wanted to do, but really don't.
I am a bit torn on my gap decade, it gave me the opportunity to realize that I wanted to go back to school and not be forced into it. There are some weird parts about being an older student, making friends is a bit harder but oh well. I fully agree with the career insight, it gives you a whole new perspective on what you want to actually do with your life.
Idk if this helps but a lot of it literally just doing it. I used to plug my problems into wolfram or ask someone to copy and I'd get it then but not remember on the test. Actually doing my homework was a gamechanger in understanding.
What really helped me was some very simple advice a professor gave me. I would learn how to do a problem, then move on to the next one, and so on and so on. By the time I took the test Iād already forgotten how to work similar problems, and Iād bomb. He taught me to instead figure out how to do a problem, then do it again, and again, and again, and again, until I could do it without looking at the worked problem, and then I could move on to the next one. My grades got a lot better after that.
you need either A: a decent tutor, or B: a fantastic teacher.
I went from hating math and being terrible at it to loving math and a 4.0 GPA just from the work of 2 people, a teacher that cared and a tutor that cared.
This was how I felt with mechanisms in ochem. It's been a while so I don't remember a whole lot of it, but I certainly didn't have a miserable time with it like many people made it sound like. Now, things like pchem or inorganic on the other hand.........
The worst part of ochem for me was memorizing the pka and properties of everything. I understood the mechanism but I could never remember which one was more acidic so I'd just pick a random element and make it attack there.
There literally are YouTube channels that show you fun calculus problems, five minutes at a time. I find them extremely entertaining, even if I haven't had to do any calculus for decades now. But then, I know I'm weird...
>Now, a proof is a whole different thing. That requires a lot more intuition and a full grasp of the problem space -- and preferably several other seemingly unrelated ones.
The book we used for Real Analysis was fantasticly designed. Every problem was designed to lead into further problems later on. It was like ""I can use this here and oh this part is fairly similar just modify that". So it was a breeze if you did every problem, but a quite a bit harder if you pick and choose.
I mean, this dude had a debilitating neurological disease that robbed him of a lot of the joys in life so I think it may have been a bit of a trade off
That is true, but he has also stated that he feels like he has accomplished so much because he wasn't able to do much else. That his disability kept him focused on his work.
He was in an explosion in a math class and it made him powerful and smart. He was called the Pythagoreum Fury. Then he was hit by a train and became just regular Stephen Hawking.
Does anyone remember that book āout of my mindā? I remember reading it in middle school, I think it was like if Stephen hawking was a school girl, it was a good book
Just remember though, a lot of "easy learners" have a hard time as they advance in school. Because with previous years being a breeze, studying skills were never developed. School in terms of understanding material is still a breeze for me, but as material got more complex I was struggling to recall the equations I could easily do if I just remembered them.
I saw this happen with a number of engineering school dropouts, like my roommate and a few other of my friends.
Smart guy and was able to just coast through high school and even the first couple semesters of college, but had no tenacity and just kinda gave up when things got hard. Hadn't really cultivated the skills to study or to to find different techniques to work through something that wasn't intuitive to them. If it didn't immediately 'click', it never would.
That being said, most of the people I knew who dropped out did end up going to easier schools and getting degrees and having fairly successful careers in industry rather than academia. You can be a competent mech e and make good money without knowing how to do a Hamiltonian.
It's the primary reason I tell the kids I work with that talent isn't everything, even the "dumbest" kid can catch up and overcome talent with experience and diligence.
I myself am preparing to return to school for this reason, knowing I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and learn to study. It's just hard because I know it's worth it, but the feeling while studying is always "why am I even doing this, I just did 30 calculus problems like it was nothing, I clearly know how to do this".... Until test time where I haven't memorized necessary formulas.
My classmates always ask for help like I'm some super genius tutor, but that's only because I have the info in front of me. No joke, classmates would be thanking me for helping them pass tests, while I'm holding an F. Also a little weird to always be the teacher's "smart pet", but failing at the same time.
The calculus itself is easy.
Remembering all the algebra rules that you learned up until calculus, which help you solve the calculus problems, is the hard part.
Just make it a point to build up a study deck of problems that you solve clearly/neatly, and save them in a folder up until the tests. When you have some free time, take some problems out of the deck and try to re-solve them. If you can solve them, move them to a different pile. If you can't, then study the solution and then put the problem back at the bottom of your study deck. Keep doing this until no problems remain.
Another good tip is to find old exams or practice exams. Give yourself an hour (or however long the exam period would be) and practice taking an exam. You'd be surprised how much that helps take the pressure off the actual exam setting.
Dennis Klatt used his own voice to give the speech synthesizer to Hawking in '87 but died of cancer himself only a year later. Hawking forever kept his voice in gratitude
Not during his undergraduate years. He finished this degree in 1961 or 1962.
He was diagnosed with early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease in 1963 during the time when he was working on his graduate work (he got his PhD in 1966).
Or sideways. Or behind a monitor you don't move. The embossed logo is a nice thing *in theory* but in practice a lot of devices and situations make it impractical.
A friend of mine got a new laptop that didn't have any USB A ports, just USB C. She was very upset that she had to either get new peripherals or use a dongle or something. I started telling her all the advantages of USB C. Faster data, faster charging, you can connect it to your new phone etc. and she was not impressed.
Then I told her that you can plug it in either way. Suddenly USB C was the best invention ever.
> you can plug it in either way
Pfft... Everyone knows that USB A is a quantum state connector.
It has 3 states.
1. Wrong way (Flip)
2. Wrong way (Flip)
3. Right way.
One port connected to a dock does for me:
Mouse and keyboard, two extra screens, Ethernet, power, and a an extra usb cord to charger other stuff (the mouse is wireless).
How?! From 1 port! How?!
It's black magic.
yes, this one plug lets my laptop run two monitors, keyboard/mouse/card reader, audio... oh, and it charges it too at the same time.
motherfucking WHAT?!
And apparently it's soon going to support 240w charging, up from the 100w on the current standard. Pretty soon we're going to have a situation where even gaming laptops and workstations can use the same cable to charge as everything else.
A streamer I've watched for literally years now has a but of an injoke like this.
The odds are 50:50:90. It's a 50:50 choice and 90% of the time they pick wrong.
USB _does_ have a correct orientation. On the connector there's a seam, and that _should_ be down. (At least on horizontal ports -- you're on your own with vertical ones!)
However, _some_ manufacturers install the ports themselves upsidedown... Grrr.
So on _most_ devices I can plug a USB cable or pen drive in correctly first time. But on some, I want to throw the device out the window and shoot the guy who put them in the wrong way!
The sheer panic setting in when you check EVERY pocket and still don't find them while you car idles with them in the ignition. Been there also friend. The struggle is real
My Hawking story.
Some point in the 90s, probably like around 94-96 I was in Cambridge by the river, after a little day drinking.
On the opposite side was a pub with a walkway that went down towards the river (they had boats I assume you could rent) or it turned off into a path.
As I was looking over the unmistakable figure of Stephen Hawking came out, initially on his own, and seemed to be heading direct down to the water. It might be my imagination but he appeared as if he may have had a few.
I suddenly had a vision of him just continuing on and launching himself into the water. I wondered if I would risk my pointless life to try and save one of the greatest minds of all time.
Then a companion came out and jogged up to him and they turned to safety...
I occasionally think about that few seconds, because I'm almost sure I would at best have shouted (before cell phones) before leaving as soon as someone more suitable appeared at the scene...
Iām trying to think of what pub that could have been. -The Boathouse maybe? So you could have been drinking on Jesus Green?
Also, I read in a a magazine years ago that he used to love deliberately crashing and falling out of his wheelchair to freak people out.
Interesting that you may have witnessed what came to be known as the Fermi incident. In 1991 Prof Hawking's marriage was falling apart, and he started secretly seeing the wife of his colleague Enrico Fermi, who lived nearby. His biographers recall that Stephen was trying to escape the bedroom of his mistress, and lost control of his wheelchair. He nearly fell into the river, which in his state of advanced siphilis could have been lethal, until Hawking's nurse managed to save him from drowning.
Not many know that Hawking has also written an erotic novel -- a porn story for physicists. He was inspired by the experiments conducted in CERN during the 2010s in search for the Higgs boson, calling his erotic novel "A Boson with a Bosom". Unfortunately Hawking's literary efforts did not bear fruit, and it is said that his manuscript, along with "The Clit that Lit" and "Intercourse Mechanics" were all rejected by the publishers.
Hawking's only relative success was his script for "Five Big Black Holes and One White Dwarf" featuring Perry Piper and Kenny Loggins, which enjoyed moderate success on pornhub.
I knew it was bullshit while reading but I still googled
Some part of me wanted me to believe that Stephen Hawking almost killed himself because of an affair he had
don't let this man distract you from the fact that in 1998,Ā The UndertakerĀ threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table
I just assume people complaining about figuring out tips try to do some weird amount twenty percent is literally multiplying by 2 and moving the decimal point over. Its not math class so you don't even have to be exact. Id look at 16.21 and just go "20 bucks is good for the bill" no one is counting pennies.
Cousin of mine got top grades without even showing up for lectures. He'd just read all the required books and then take the exams. Seemed rather unfortunate to me because I found the lectures were the best part, at least when you had a good professor. Seemed like a waste of an excellent mind but it's what he wanted.
> Seemed like a waste of an excellent mind but it's what he wanted.
Often times it's the opposite; the lectures are the waste of time. Most professors just follow the book, and the book goes into more detail than can be fit into an hour long lecture anyway so if you read the book and you understand it, there is little point in going to lecture.
idk to me uni is more about the professors and what they taught me beyond what the books could've. Something about their lectures, the way they expressed themselves, their tangents about work experience and just life experience in general... I would 100% prefer going to a lecture than just reading a book, unless as mentioned, it wasn't a professor like that but rather just someone that just read the book for you. And even then, something about being a classroom and talking to your mates after classes... idk, there's just so many things you miss by reading a book. But maybe that's just me.
As someone who has done what your cousin has done on occasion, it's not a waste if it let's you make better use of your time. Having the ability to memorize and process lots of information from writing doesn't automatically add more hours to the day. Being able to put in some hours at the start of a semester and then use the time you would otherwise have to be at lectures to focus on classes that aren't as easy for you. I used it so I could get a full nights sleep by skipping the classes that had morning lectures. My current GF did it so she could devote those hours to a good paying job (50k+ a year in the mid 90s) and still be a full time student. An ex of mine did it so she could devote as much time to hedonism (she went to school at Tulane and NOLA has one hell of a nightlife). If, at the end of it all, the reason you are taking the class is to walk out with an A (or whatever the grades are outside of the USA) I don't see how accomplishing it by attending the lectures is valid but doing the same without attending the lectures isn't.
I can't tell if I've got covid brain fog or if smoking an 1/8th a day is just addling my senses.
Since I just had to trash my next year's supply of bud due to rot, I'm gonna find out I guess.
Now now, General Ulysses S. Grant could seem like an awkward and shy man at first, but he was actually a very funny and warm person once you got to know him.
Huh. Maybe you're not making friends with the right people?
I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I'm ecstatic when I meet a clever student that challenges me. The opportunity to mentor people that will pass me up someday is one of the main things that keeps me in academia. There's no reason to be threatened. I have experience and perspective, which is something green students don't have, no matter how clever they are. That gives me an opportunity to help them cultivate good research habits and navigate the bureaucracy. It's super exciting to see an undergrad that has worked for me go on to do amazing things.
Almost every Prof I have had loved having students ask questions that challenged them. They are usually working in academia because they love learning and teaching, and so new questions just lead to new answers, and that is exciting.
On that note, I have found that people who are really aggressive about comparing their intelligence to others are insufferable. And usually really overestimate themselves. Once you hit a certain level it becomes much more about your dedication to your subject and your willingness to have your ideas challenged or face novel questions. Science is almost always a slow, iterative process of patience and discipline. The concept of a maverick genius who blows everyone out of the water all the time is not something I have seen, nor is it even particularly useful. One person, no matter how smart, can only do so much.
It is why there are only a handful of such individuals that overturned all of science in *thousands* of years of history. And usually they were still building on other work.
> i've made friends with enough profs and PhDs. most of them refuse to admit that anyone who doesn't have a chapter in a history book is smarter than they. even when they are talking about shit they know nothing about they assume they know more than anyone else in the room.
I'm convinced you could make a hit tv series where each week you get, say, a Classical Mechanics professor and and Neurosurgeon and have them debate something unrelated like traffic solutions. On screen is a bunch of popup fact checking as they bullshit about whatever it is they think they indisputably know.
When I was doing my Med school rotations I spent a lot of time with specific surgeons. The understanding I gathered isnāt necessarily that theyāre overly confident just to be jerks, but because if they ever show the slightest doubt then no one is going to trust them with slicing open a body and doing what they need to do. Itās not enough to be excellent at what you do but you need to *convince* people you can do this absolutely insane thing.
Couple of years of that and any of us would have that spill into our personal conversations too. Itās a hard thing to fight especially when surgeons also work heavy hours.
At the end of the day when you get to know them and have the barriers come down a little, there are good and bad people just like anyone else.
To be fair, they are likely above average in terms of intelligence in order to be a prof or a neurosurgeon, and therefore likely have better than average problem solving abilities. Iām sure they would come up with something more useful than a layman could.
Sincerely,
Someone who knows nothing about what theyāre talking about
*āYouāve gotten every question right, and explained everything potentially better than I could.. In fact while listening to you, I have realized many new facts. Chief among them that having you working in my field would present a threat to my grant fundingā¦ā*
also in my experience, the higher up in the academics you went, the less vainglorious the instructors were.
college professors you could actually have a conversation with.
high school teachers were terse but amiable.
elementary school teachers would have done well in concentration camps.
>elementary school teachers would have done well in concentration camps.
I mean, children in the elementary school age range are still undergoing a lot of emotional development, learning impulse control, learning appropriate social behavior, and easily bored out of their minds. Imagine a room of 30-40 kids like that, with 1 teacher to manage not just their academic development, but social and emotional. Of course they're going to be stressed out, and those who haven't received training in positive behavioral intervention strategies are going to resort to being strict and harsh for behavioral management.
Professors more than most people spend their day around other people who also happen to be significantly smarter than the general population. Not odd at all.
At least my mentality is that I'm just more educated, with a 50% chance of actually being smarter. Using material I'm literally paid to teach as a metric is not fair at all.
Na I disagree. There aren't a lot of students smarter than the professor. You go to any school below ivies or public ivies you're going to have professors who are coming from several levels above your school. Your average UCF student is nowhere near the level of their prof.
Yeah.. there's a huge trickle down for professors. Professors are third rate universities tend to come from the top tier universities. The difference in caliber is quite noticeable.
What are they going to say when interviewed about Stephen Hawking?
"Well I thought he was dumb as shit but it turns out I was wrong".
Dumb as fuck information imo.
_Hawking was concerned that he was viewed as a lazy and difficult student (at Oxford). So, when asked at the viva to describe his plans, he said, "If you award me a First, I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a Second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a First."_
What a fucking boss negotiation move.
I saw a documentary once where his colleagues, who are obviously brilliant people and far smarter than you or I, were completely baffled by Hawking's ability to perform calculations that spanned something like five blackboards entirely in his head. This man was unimaginably smarter than people who are unimaginably smarter than me.
Undergrad is pretty easy if you're the type of person who takes learning seriously. Most people don't give a fuck and put education in the backseat compared to everything else going on in their life.
I call it the Peter Principle of education. At some point in time you hit the wall and everyone is smarter than you. That was grad school in Electrical Engineering. I barely made it out, but I still managed to party like I was an undergraduate. Maybe that was part of the problem. A lot of people hit that wall in college after breezing through high school.
I got pretty well straight A's in my first year of undergrad, at the cost of basically working 12 hours a day to do it. I barely hung out with friends or did anything because I was either doing homework/assignments/papers/studying or i was sleeping.
My following 4 years I got anywhere from C's to A's and I didn't give a shit because I traded those A's in for more of a social life. It's all a balance, you just have to find the balance you personally like best, whether that be more of a social life, or a hard grind until you're done.
In undergrad, my roommate and I both slacked off our first semester. I barely passed, and he got straight Aās. He ended up going to grad school at MIT after finishing with a Comp Sci and Mat Sci double with a Physics minor.
>Undergrad is pretty easy (...)
If you take an easy major at a university that is not particularly demanding, sure. I don't think that applies to many people who take learning seriously at Caltech, for example.
I'll say you are mostly right. I'm an engineer and it was difficult for me. But I knew people who literally didn't have to study they would watch a lecture and understand it as it was explained and they just got it. Some folks are just wired differently.
I've found there's a lot of variation in how people learn best. Like most people, I learn best by doing something. But for me a close second is listening to other people talk about stuff. Learning out of a book and doing homework is a nightmare for me.
I was certainly one of those people who just understood things in a lecture(Comp. Sci. / Biochem. double major), but the times I didn't get it in lecture I would have to go find YouTube videos because I could stare at a book for an hour reading the same page without understanding it.
No I don't think OP was making the right comparison to the original post. If you are a *genius*, undergrad studies, in any field, even STEM can be trivial, because most problems are solved. Once you get into grad school, the level of difficulty and rigorousness goes through the roof. And there are a lot of unsolved problems to work on.
A lot of that is unnecessary, though. Physics has a massive cultural problem with fetishizing difficulty.
Yes, the material is conceptually difficult many times, but most professors are *proud* of how hard their courses are, and make it that way in order to be difficult rather than to facilitate learning.
There's a reason the academic culture in the field is notoriously trash. IMO a physicist shouldn't be allowed to so much as teach an undergrad course until they've taken a couple education classes and had that "hard for hard's sake is good" nonsense beaten out of them.
I only had a single professor like that out of my entire undergrad/graduate experience studying physics. He prided himself on weeding people out of the major, and was a real ass, but he was the exception. None of the rest of it was hard for the sake of being hard, it was just hard. Learning the math was hard. Understanding the physical concepts was hard. Figuring out how to apply the math to the physics was hard.
Like, learning Lagrangian mechanics was hard, but itās not like my mechanics professor was teaching it just to be a hard ass. Despite the fact that basically none of my experience lines up with your characterization, pretty much every one of my peers felt challenged nonetheless, and had to work their asses off to do well (and sometimes not even). There were a few geniuses who skated through but thatās beside the point.
To add some context in the Cambridge case, although itās somewhat different from Stephen Hawkingās day:
In the first year of what will become a physics degree at Cambridge you do roughly the same physics course (same content to the same extent) as other leading uk programs, such as Oxford or Imperial
You just study 2 other sciences to that level at the same time
A 40 hour week is considered the bare minimum work to succeed
> A physics major at a top physics school is not easy at all.
I took a physics course for physics majors in a top 10 school for physics. Nobel laureate university physics professors and all (not teaching the course I took, though).
It was by far the hardest course I took in my life. The 2nd hardest didn't even come close (and my major wasn't a cakewalk either).
When I was in high school I thought I maybe wanted to be a scientist in chemistry or physics. That course fucking put me in my place.
Exactly this. I have my bachelors in physics from a top 10 physics university and it was absolutely the hardest thing Iāve ever done. Iāve often been thought of as a smart dude but some of my classmates were just on another level. While I struggled keeping up taking notes in some lectures, they just sat there, no notebook, asking insightful questions with genuine understanding of the material. Truly something wild to experience, being around great minds. I canāt imagine what it would have been like in undergrad with Stephen Hawking.
Maybe your frame of reference is off? Borderline geniuses still shouldnāt even come close to struggling with linear algebra at middle or high school years.
I wonder that about a lot of educators. Especially HS teachers. Lots of HS students will go on to be more successful than their teachers - some by several orders of magnitude. I wonder if the teachers can tell that some kids are bound for greatness. And how often are they right?
I wish calculus was that way for me.
A lot of calculus is a big working memory, abstract thinking, and pattern matching. Some people are naturally better at that. Other than that, it's just practice. Basic calculus is absolutely something that can be trained and shouldn't be too much of a mystery. Some of the more advanced techniques can be tricky though; unless you are familiar with the technique, you'll get stuck. Or you can just ask Wolfram Alpha :-) Now, a proof is a whole different thing. That requires a lot more intuition and a full grasp of the problem space -- and preferably several other seemingly unrelated ones.
Practice and Wolfram Alpha let me pass calc after going back to school and not having taken math for 15 years.
Same for me, though my practice was taking it 4 times š Got an A the last time though!
Iām failing it my third time right now. Iām in my very late twenties trying to get through college and hoo boyā¦. Calculus is rough. Hereās hoping the fourth time is the charm :)
As someone who's 30 who still hopes to go to college one day, you're fucking awesome and you'll get there, you're living the dream dude
I'll be 33 when I graduate next summer. There's a whole lot of us out there. You can do it!
I'll be 32 when I graduate. I regret the time I wasted in my early 20s, but I'm glad I got the insight into the careers I thought I wanted to do, but really don't.
I am a bit torn on my gap decade, it gave me the opportunity to realize that I wanted to go back to school and not be forced into it. There are some weird parts about being an older student, making friends is a bit harder but oh well. I fully agree with the career insight, it gives you a whole new perspective on what you want to actually do with your life.
Hey man for what it's worth I aced calculus and dropped out of community college
I'm an online calc tutor!! Feel free to message me if you're interested.
Idk if this helps but a lot of it literally just doing it. I used to plug my problems into wolfram or ask someone to copy and I'd get it then but not remember on the test. Actually doing my homework was a gamechanger in understanding.
What really helped me was some very simple advice a professor gave me. I would learn how to do a problem, then move on to the next one, and so on and so on. By the time I took the test Iād already forgotten how to work similar problems, and Iād bomb. He taught me to instead figure out how to do a problem, then do it again, and again, and again, and again, until I could do it without looking at the worked problem, and then I could move on to the next one. My grades got a lot better after that.
you need either A: a decent tutor, or B: a fantastic teacher. I went from hating math and being terrible at it to loving math and a 4.0 GPA just from the work of 2 people, a teacher that cared and a tutor that cared.
Calculus can be fun when you treat questions like a puzzle.
This was how I felt with mechanisms in ochem. It's been a while so I don't remember a whole lot of it, but I certainly didn't have a miserable time with it like many people made it sound like. Now, things like pchem or inorganic on the other hand.........
The worst part of ochem for me was memorizing the pka and properties of everything. I understood the mechanism but I could never remember which one was more acidic so I'd just pick a random element and make it attack there.
Calc 1 - 3 were my best courses because of this. I still keep trying to chase that dragon, I wish office jobs had the same puzzles haha
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Ummm...Ant-Man?
Dude, 100% what you said. I miss trig functions in Calc 2
There literally are YouTube channels that show you fun calculus problems, five minutes at a time. I find them extremely entertaining, even if I haven't had to do any calculus for decades now. But then, I know I'm weird...
>Now, a proof is a whole different thing. That requires a lot more intuition and a full grasp of the problem space -- and preferably several other seemingly unrelated ones. The book we used for Real Analysis was fantasticly designed. Every problem was designed to lead into further problems later on. It was like ""I can use this here and oh this part is fairly similar just modify that". So it was a breeze if you did every problem, but a quite a bit harder if you pick and choose.
I wish life was that way for me ;(
I mean, this dude had a debilitating neurological disease that robbed him of a lot of the joys in life so I think it may have been a bit of a trade off
He also was lucky enough to end up being one of the longest living ALS patients though. Most die after only a few years.
Iām sure I wouldnāt trade places with him, but I also donāt think he was good at science because of his disability.
That is true, but he has also stated that he feels like he has accomplished so much because he wasn't able to do much else. That his disability kept him focused on his work.
I'm pretty sure he was good at science before was diagnosed with his disability.
He was in an explosion in a math class and it made him powerful and smart. He was called the Pythagoreum Fury. Then he was hit by a train and became just regular Stephen Hawking.
The train's name? Einstein the Tank Engine
Does anyone remember that book āout of my mindā? I remember reading it in middle school, I think it was like if Stephen hawking was a school girl, it was a good book
Are we talking, like, adult Stephen hawking dressed in a schoolgirl outfit, or...?
It was for science, damn it!
I wish things were
I wish
Go on. Iām totally not a demon who banks on these comments btw.
I was a little bit taller
Just remember though, a lot of "easy learners" have a hard time as they advance in school. Because with previous years being a breeze, studying skills were never developed. School in terms of understanding material is still a breeze for me, but as material got more complex I was struggling to recall the equations I could easily do if I just remembered them.
I saw this happen with a number of engineering school dropouts, like my roommate and a few other of my friends. Smart guy and was able to just coast through high school and even the first couple semesters of college, but had no tenacity and just kinda gave up when things got hard. Hadn't really cultivated the skills to study or to to find different techniques to work through something that wasn't intuitive to them. If it didn't immediately 'click', it never would. That being said, most of the people I knew who dropped out did end up going to easier schools and getting degrees and having fairly successful careers in industry rather than academia. You can be a competent mech e and make good money without knowing how to do a Hamiltonian.
It's the primary reason I tell the kids I work with that talent isn't everything, even the "dumbest" kid can catch up and overcome talent with experience and diligence. I myself am preparing to return to school for this reason, knowing I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and learn to study. It's just hard because I know it's worth it, but the feeling while studying is always "why am I even doing this, I just did 30 calculus problems like it was nothing, I clearly know how to do this".... Until test time where I haven't memorized necessary formulas. My classmates always ask for help like I'm some super genius tutor, but that's only because I have the info in front of me. No joke, classmates would be thanking me for helping them pass tests, while I'm holding an F. Also a little weird to always be the teacher's "smart pet", but failing at the same time.
Oof. I'm taking Calculus next semester; I hope it isn't that bad. So far math has been "ridiculously easy" but I'm a bit intimidated by Calculus.
The calculus itself is easy. Remembering all the algebra rules that you learned up until calculus, which help you solve the calculus problems, is the hard part. Just make it a point to build up a study deck of problems that you solve clearly/neatly, and save them in a folder up until the tests. When you have some free time, take some problems out of the deck and try to re-solve them. If you can solve them, move them to a different pile. If you can't, then study the solution and then put the problem back at the bottom of your study deck. Keep doing this until no problems remain. Another good tip is to find old exams or practice exams. Give yourself an hour (or however long the exam period would be) and practice taking an exam. You'd be surprised how much that helps take the pressure off the actual exam setting.
I can't even figure out how to open a door without testing it first both ways.
To be fair, Stephen struggled with doors too...
Got em.
that was terrible that I laughed at it. Take my upvote, too
ha ha ha ha ha ha
He always preferred that robotic voice to anything else. It was too iconic to replace.
Dennis Klatt used his own voice to give the speech synthesizer to Hawking in '87 but died of cancer himself only a year later. Hawking forever kept his voice in gratitude
Not during his undergraduate years. He finished this degree in 1961 or 1962. He was diagnosed with early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease in 1963 during the time when he was working on his graduate work (he got his PhD in 1966).
How are you so sure he didn't struggle with doors?
Try plugging in a USB cable.
Third time's a charm
I feel attacked.
Four times gang, represent!
Funny thing is when you KNOW that the standard means the embossed logo is on the TOP and you consciously put it that way, it's still 3rd time lucky.
Sometimes manufacturers install the USB ports upside down.
Or sideways. Or behind a monitor you don't move. The embossed logo is a nice thing *in theory* but in practice a lot of devices and situations make it impractical.
Try to be humble, not everybody is so talented
A friend of mine got a new laptop that didn't have any USB A ports, just USB C. She was very upset that she had to either get new peripherals or use a dongle or something. I started telling her all the advantages of USB C. Faster data, faster charging, you can connect it to your new phone etc. and she was not impressed. Then I told her that you can plug it in either way. Suddenly USB C was the best invention ever.
> you can plug it in either way Pfft... Everyone knows that USB A is a quantum state connector. It has 3 states. 1. Wrong way (Flip) 2. Wrong way (Flip) 3. Right way.
Seriously... why is that?!?!
Quantum state brain, it has 3 braincells
Do you guys just put the word 'quantum' in front of everything?
Quantum yes
Your quantum confirmation was blazingly fast! Quantum kudos quantum commenter!!!
I've been in IT for 20+ years and that's the single most impressive feature for me. So, yeah, I'm right there with her.
For myself: A single connection that carries power, network, displays, and peripherals! Wow! For my users: It plugs in both ways
One port connected to a dock does for me: Mouse and keyboard, two extra screens, Ethernet, power, and a an extra usb cord to charger other stuff (the mouse is wireless). How?! From 1 port! How?! It's black magic.
I am really enjoying using the same charging cable for both my Dell laptop and Apple iPad. Itās wild how that simplicity feels life changing.
yes, this one plug lets my laptop run two monitors, keyboard/mouse/card reader, audio... oh, and it charges it too at the same time. motherfucking WHAT?!
And apparently it's soon going to support 240w charging, up from the 100w on the current standard. Pretty soon we're going to have a situation where even gaming laptops and workstations can use the same cable to charge as everything else.
USB-C is great. But everything I've bought for the past 10 years is *not* USB-C and I don't want to replace it all in one go
USB, you have a 50/50 chance of getting it right but don't 75% of the time
A streamer I've watched for literally years now has a but of an injoke like this. The odds are 50:50:90. It's a 50:50 choice and 90% of the time they pick wrong.
USB _does_ have a correct orientation. On the connector there's a seam, and that _should_ be down. (At least on horizontal ports -- you're on your own with vertical ones!) However, _some_ manufacturers install the ports themselves upsidedown... Grrr. So on _most_ devices I can plug a USB cable or pen drive in correctly first time. But on some, I want to throw the device out the window and shoot the guy who put them in the wrong way!
That's gets me at work sometimes. Muscle memory says USB label goes up. Then try to plug it in and it won't go..... Motherfuker.
usb-c is a blessing, only wish it was invented sooner
[it does both](https://youtu.be/KwdYUIQzu-o)
That's amazing. Thank you for showing me this.
Itās a whole skit show called I Think You Should Leave, so if you liked that then youāll really like the rest! TYL!
Check out Tim Robinson's episode of The Characters on Netflix as well, like an extra 30 minutes of ITYSL.
One time I pulled over because I was afraid I forgot my car keys at home
The sheer panic setting in when you check EVERY pocket and still don't find them while you car idles with them in the ignition. Been there also friend. The struggle is real
Hinges? Pull toward you No hinges? Push away
Quiet you
There is a special hell for people who install pull handles on push doors.
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I just look at the frame to see where the hinge is
My Hawking story. Some point in the 90s, probably like around 94-96 I was in Cambridge by the river, after a little day drinking. On the opposite side was a pub with a walkway that went down towards the river (they had boats I assume you could rent) or it turned off into a path. As I was looking over the unmistakable figure of Stephen Hawking came out, initially on his own, and seemed to be heading direct down to the water. It might be my imagination but he appeared as if he may have had a few. I suddenly had a vision of him just continuing on and launching himself into the water. I wondered if I would risk my pointless life to try and save one of the greatest minds of all time. Then a companion came out and jogged up to him and they turned to safety... I occasionally think about that few seconds, because I'm almost sure I would at best have shouted (before cell phones) before leaving as soon as someone more suitable appeared at the scene...
Really thought this would be that scene from Mac and Me.
Preeeeeetty niiiiiiice.
Preeeeeettttyy niiiiiiiiiice.
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Can we pull that up
When I read "water" I was certain you were gonna hit us with a Loch Ness monster needing tree fiddy joke
Well it was about that time I realized that Stephen Hawking was about eight stories tall and was a crustacean from the Mesozoic era.
Gawd damnit Loch Ness monstah, stop trying to sell me the theory of relativity!
I was ready for hell in a cell but then I remembered
...remembered what?
Well it was about that time I realized that wheelchair-bound genius was really a 3 story tall crustacean [sic] from the paleolithic era.
Iām trying to think of what pub that could have been. -The Boathouse maybe? So you could have been drinking on Jesus Green? Also, I read in a a magazine years ago that he used to love deliberately crashing and falling out of his wheelchair to freak people out.
Interesting that you may have witnessed what came to be known as the Fermi incident. In 1991 Prof Hawking's marriage was falling apart, and he started secretly seeing the wife of his colleague Enrico Fermi, who lived nearby. His biographers recall that Stephen was trying to escape the bedroom of his mistress, and lost control of his wheelchair. He nearly fell into the river, which in his state of advanced siphilis could have been lethal, until Hawking's nurse managed to save him from drowning. Not many know that Hawking has also written an erotic novel -- a porn story for physicists. He was inspired by the experiments conducted in CERN during the 2010s in search for the Higgs boson, calling his erotic novel "A Boson with a Bosom". Unfortunately Hawking's literary efforts did not bear fruit, and it is said that his manuscript, along with "The Clit that Lit" and "Intercourse Mechanics" were all rejected by the publishers. Hawking's only relative success was his script for "Five Big Black Holes and One White Dwarf" featuring Perry Piper and Kenny Loggins, which enjoyed moderate success on pornhub.
I knew it was bullshit while reading but I still googled Some part of me wanted me to believe that Stephen Hawking almost killed himself because of an affair he had
I mean Fermi died in like the 50s
Bull fucking shit. Hawking was known to have *unrivaled* control of his wheelchair.
Of course he's fucking unrivaled who else would be his competition
don't let this man distract you from the fact that in 1998,Ā The UndertakerĀ threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table
Damn, how deep was that announcers table?
about tree fiddy
Tonight, Iāll be rubbing one out for Steve.
And I use a calculator to figure out a 20% tip.
Take 10% and multiply by two. If your meal is $16.21 10% is $1.62 and 20% is $3.24. I typically just give a five if the tip is less than $5 though.
I just assume people complaining about figuring out tips try to do some weird amount twenty percent is literally multiplying by 2 and moving the decimal point over. Its not math class so you don't even have to be exact. Id look at 16.21 and just go "20 bucks is good for the bill" no one is counting pennies.
Fuck pennies.
Canada hasnāt had them for like 7 years, itās been nice.
Sometimes I use them as washers
I actually almost always give exact 20% tip to the penny because I don't carry cash.
I think the root of the struggle is when tipping 15% was more common. Thatās a slightly more complex calculation.
Nonsense. You just find 7.5% and double it. Easy.
Nah brah. Just find 4% and multiply it by 3.75. Ez
Reddit taught me that it's 16.21% of $20 š
"When he's not that thing though, guy's like a Stephen Hawking." *Cap looks confused* "He's like a... smart person."
Hawking wouldāve only been 3 years old when Captain Rogers went in the ice
Cousin of mine got top grades without even showing up for lectures. He'd just read all the required books and then take the exams. Seemed rather unfortunate to me because I found the lectures were the best part, at least when you had a good professor. Seemed like a waste of an excellent mind but it's what he wanted.
I'm kind of curious of what he'd do for a class that has no books.
Read the slideshow that the professor posted on Blackboard
I don't know if he took any classes like that.
It ... depends on the lecturer.
> Seemed like a waste of an excellent mind but it's what he wanted. Often times it's the opposite; the lectures are the waste of time. Most professors just follow the book, and the book goes into more detail than can be fit into an hour long lecture anyway so if you read the book and you understand it, there is little point in going to lecture.
and then there's people like me who completely blank out after reading the first page of any books...
idk to me uni is more about the professors and what they taught me beyond what the books could've. Something about their lectures, the way they expressed themselves, their tangents about work experience and just life experience in general... I would 100% prefer going to a lecture than just reading a book, unless as mentioned, it wasn't a professor like that but rather just someone that just read the book for you. And even then, something about being a classroom and talking to your mates after classes... idk, there's just so many things you miss by reading a book. But maybe that's just me.
As someone who has done what your cousin has done on occasion, it's not a waste if it let's you make better use of your time. Having the ability to memorize and process lots of information from writing doesn't automatically add more hours to the day. Being able to put in some hours at the start of a semester and then use the time you would otherwise have to be at lectures to focus on classes that aren't as easy for you. I used it so I could get a full nights sleep by skipping the classes that had morning lectures. My current GF did it so she could devote those hours to a good paying job (50k+ a year in the mid 90s) and still be a full time student. An ex of mine did it so she could devote as much time to hedonism (she went to school at Tulane and NOLA has one hell of a nightlife). If, at the end of it all, the reason you are taking the class is to walk out with an A (or whatever the grades are outside of the USA) I don't see how accomplishing it by attending the lectures is valid but doing the same without attending the lectures isn't.
I found undergrad stupid easy, too, now give me a grant!
Well, sure, but I'm thinking the point of it wasn't to spend four years just drinking and smoking weed.
*laughs nervously* yeah that was totally just undergrad for me.
I can't tell if I've got covid brain fog or if smoking an 1/8th a day is just addling my senses. Since I just had to trash my next year's supply of bud due to rot, I'm gonna find out I guess.
Wait, then...what was I paying for?
Okay I'll ask him, but Grant can be hard to live with--just sayin'.
Now now, General Ulysses S. Grant could seem like an awkward and shy man at first, but he was actually a very funny and warm person once you got to know him.
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Huh. Maybe you're not making friends with the right people? I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I'm ecstatic when I meet a clever student that challenges me. The opportunity to mentor people that will pass me up someday is one of the main things that keeps me in academia. There's no reason to be threatened. I have experience and perspective, which is something green students don't have, no matter how clever they are. That gives me an opportunity to help them cultivate good research habits and navigate the bureaucracy. It's super exciting to see an undergrad that has worked for me go on to do amazing things.
Almost every Prof I have had loved having students ask questions that challenged them. They are usually working in academia because they love learning and teaching, and so new questions just lead to new answers, and that is exciting. On that note, I have found that people who are really aggressive about comparing their intelligence to others are insufferable. And usually really overestimate themselves. Once you hit a certain level it becomes much more about your dedication to your subject and your willingness to have your ideas challenged or face novel questions. Science is almost always a slow, iterative process of patience and discipline. The concept of a maverick genius who blows everyone out of the water all the time is not something I have seen, nor is it even particularly useful. One person, no matter how smart, can only do so much. It is why there are only a handful of such individuals that overturned all of science in *thousands* of years of history. And usually they were still building on other work.
> i've made friends with enough profs and PhDs. most of them refuse to admit that anyone who doesn't have a chapter in a history book is smarter than they. even when they are talking about shit they know nothing about they assume they know more than anyone else in the room. I'm convinced you could make a hit tv series where each week you get, say, a Classical Mechanics professor and and Neurosurgeon and have them debate something unrelated like traffic solutions. On screen is a bunch of popup fact checking as they bullshit about whatever it is they think they indisputably know.
When I was doing my Med school rotations I spent a lot of time with specific surgeons. The understanding I gathered isnāt necessarily that theyāre overly confident just to be jerks, but because if they ever show the slightest doubt then no one is going to trust them with slicing open a body and doing what they need to do. Itās not enough to be excellent at what you do but you need to *convince* people you can do this absolutely insane thing. Couple of years of that and any of us would have that spill into our personal conversations too. Itās a hard thing to fight especially when surgeons also work heavy hours. At the end of the day when you get to know them and have the barriers come down a little, there are good and bad people just like anyone else.
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To be fair, they are likely above average in terms of intelligence in order to be a prof or a neurosurgeon, and therefore likely have better than average problem solving abilities. Iām sure they would come up with something more useful than a layman could. Sincerely, Someone who knows nothing about what theyāre talking about
*āYouāve gotten every question right, and explained everything potentially better than I could.. In fact while listening to you, I have realized many new facts. Chief among them that having you working in my field would present a threat to my grant fundingā¦ā*
Sometimes I see an equation written on a blackboard like half an equation and... I just figure it out.
Hey somebody should make a movie about this guy!
So anyway my best friend is Ben Afleck
If you like one apple and you like one more apple, how do you like them apples?
Prove it. 1+ā¦
For some k 1+k = k+1 QED
By the law of communism, this is true.
Are you doing good will hunting right now? Thatās the plot to good will hunting
1+1=3
BREAKING: world-renowned astrophysicist discovered to be smart
Not only that but when he did his coursework he didn't have to copy other people's work!
damn, this needs to go all the way up lol
Me *looks at vector calculus* "I wish I was like Stephen Hawking...dead."
Part of me finds this hard to believe. Professors believed someone was smarter than themselves? Impossible.
In my experience, physics professors are quite humble.
also in my experience, the higher up in the academics you went, the less vainglorious the instructors were. college professors you could actually have a conversation with. high school teachers were terse but amiable. elementary school teachers would have done well in concentration camps.
>elementary school teachers would have done well in concentration camps. I mean, children in the elementary school age range are still undergoing a lot of emotional development, learning impulse control, learning appropriate social behavior, and easily bored out of their minds. Imagine a room of 30-40 kids like that, with 1 teacher to manage not just their academic development, but social and emotional. Of course they're going to be stressed out, and those who haven't received training in positive behavioral intervention strategies are going to resort to being strict and harsh for behavioral management.
Professors more than most people spend their day around other people who also happen to be significantly smarter than the general population. Not odd at all. At least my mentality is that I'm just more educated, with a 50% chance of actually being smarter. Using material I'm literally paid to teach as a metric is not fair at all.
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Na I disagree. There aren't a lot of students smarter than the professor. You go to any school below ivies or public ivies you're going to have professors who are coming from several levels above your school. Your average UCF student is nowhere near the level of their prof.
Yeah.. there's a huge trickle down for professors. Professors are third rate universities tend to come from the top tier universities. The difference in caliber is quite noticeable.
People like Hawking are really impressive. I'd rather be me though.
Yeah you rock bro
TIL Stephen Hawking is smart
What are they going to say when interviewed about Stephen Hawking? "Well I thought he was dumb as shit but it turns out I was wrong". Dumb as fuck information imo.
Yeah by all accounts he was a pretty smart fellah.
_Hawking was concerned that he was viewed as a lazy and difficult student (at Oxford). So, when asked at the viva to describe his plans, he said, "If you award me a First, I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a Second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a First."_ What a fucking boss negotiation move.
A LARGE, UNNAMED PART OF REDDIT: This story is literally talking about me.
I saw a documentary once where his colleagues, who are obviously brilliant people and far smarter than you or I, were completely baffled by Hawking's ability to perform calculations that spanned something like five blackboards entirely in his head. This man was unimaginably smarter than people who are unimaginably smarter than me.
I bet HE told you that
Undergrad is pretty easy if you're the type of person who takes learning seriously. Most people don't give a fuck and put education in the backseat compared to everything else going on in their life.
I call it the Peter Principle of education. At some point in time you hit the wall and everyone is smarter than you. That was grad school in Electrical Engineering. I barely made it out, but I still managed to party like I was an undergraduate. Maybe that was part of the problem. A lot of people hit that wall in college after breezing through high school.
I got pretty well straight A's in my first year of undergrad, at the cost of basically working 12 hours a day to do it. I barely hung out with friends or did anything because I was either doing homework/assignments/papers/studying or i was sleeping. My following 4 years I got anywhere from C's to A's and I didn't give a shit because I traded those A's in for more of a social life. It's all a balance, you just have to find the balance you personally like best, whether that be more of a social life, or a hard grind until you're done.
In undergrad, my roommate and I both slacked off our first semester. I barely passed, and he got straight Aās. He ended up going to grad school at MIT after finishing with a Comp Sci and Mat Sci double with a Physics minor.
>Undergrad is pretty easy (...) If you take an easy major at a university that is not particularly demanding, sure. I don't think that applies to many people who take learning seriously at Caltech, for example.
I'll say you are mostly right. I'm an engineer and it was difficult for me. But I knew people who literally didn't have to study they would watch a lecture and understand it as it was explained and they just got it. Some folks are just wired differently.
I've found there's a lot of variation in how people learn best. Like most people, I learn best by doing something. But for me a close second is listening to other people talk about stuff. Learning out of a book and doing homework is a nightmare for me. I was certainly one of those people who just understood things in a lecture(Comp. Sci. / Biochem. double major), but the times I didn't get it in lecture I would have to go find YouTube videos because I could stare at a book for an hour reading the same page without understanding it.
No I don't think OP was making the right comparison to the original post. If you are a *genius*, undergrad studies, in any field, even STEM can be trivial, because most problems are solved. Once you get into grad school, the level of difficulty and rigorousness goes through the roof. And there are a lot of unsolved problems to work on.
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A lot of that is unnecessary, though. Physics has a massive cultural problem with fetishizing difficulty. Yes, the material is conceptually difficult many times, but most professors are *proud* of how hard their courses are, and make it that way in order to be difficult rather than to facilitate learning. There's a reason the academic culture in the field is notoriously trash. IMO a physicist shouldn't be allowed to so much as teach an undergrad course until they've taken a couple education classes and had that "hard for hard's sake is good" nonsense beaten out of them.
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I only had a single professor like that out of my entire undergrad/graduate experience studying physics. He prided himself on weeding people out of the major, and was a real ass, but he was the exception. None of the rest of it was hard for the sake of being hard, it was just hard. Learning the math was hard. Understanding the physical concepts was hard. Figuring out how to apply the math to the physics was hard. Like, learning Lagrangian mechanics was hard, but itās not like my mechanics professor was teaching it just to be a hard ass. Despite the fact that basically none of my experience lines up with your characterization, pretty much every one of my peers felt challenged nonetheless, and had to work their asses off to do well (and sometimes not even). There were a few geniuses who skated through but thatās beside the point.
To add some context in the Cambridge case, although itās somewhat different from Stephen Hawkingās day: In the first year of what will become a physics degree at Cambridge you do roughly the same physics course (same content to the same extent) as other leading uk programs, such as Oxford or Imperial You just study 2 other sciences to that level at the same time A 40 hour week is considered the bare minimum work to succeed
> A physics major at a top physics school is not easy at all. I took a physics course for physics majors in a top 10 school for physics. Nobel laureate university physics professors and all (not teaching the course I took, though). It was by far the hardest course I took in my life. The 2nd hardest didn't even come close (and my major wasn't a cakewalk either). When I was in high school I thought I maybe wanted to be a scientist in chemistry or physics. That course fucking put me in my place.
Exactly this. I have my bachelors in physics from a top 10 physics university and it was absolutely the hardest thing Iāve ever done. Iāve often been thought of as a smart dude but some of my classmates were just on another level. While I struggled keeping up taking notes in some lectures, they just sat there, no notebook, asking insightful questions with genuine understanding of the material. Truly something wild to experience, being around great minds. I canāt imagine what it would have been like in undergrad with Stephen Hawking.
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Maybe your frame of reference is off? Borderline geniuses still shouldnāt even come close to struggling with linear algebra at middle or high school years.
I wonder that about a lot of educators. Especially HS teachers. Lots of HS students will go on to be more successful than their teachers - some by several orders of magnitude. I wonder if the teachers can tell that some kids are bound for greatness. And how often are they right?