Quadratics
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 104
Likes: 0
From: Birmingham, England (sometimes)
Hold a bit Dimensional,
Genghis and Blacksheep are reliving their own schooldays - roughly the same as mine from the topics discussed - no-one mentioned the relative difficulty of today's A levels compared with what we put up with. Your list seems to similar to the NUJMB 1968 sylabus as far as I recall so no change in difficulty there then!
Best of luck with the further maths - I tried and failed !
VnV...
Genghis and Blacksheep are reliving their own schooldays - roughly the same as mine from the topics discussed - no-one mentioned the relative difficulty of today's A levels compared with what we put up with. Your list seems to similar to the NUJMB 1968 sylabus as far as I recall so no change in difficulty there then!
Best of luck with the further maths - I tried and failed !
VnV...
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 1,914
Likes: 0
From: UK
By Jove I enjoyed that! Dusted off the old 'O' level maths a treat, and the answer popped out like a sweetie. The secret with quadratics is like 'how do you get to Carnegie Hall?' Practice practice practice. Do them time and again, and again......and again! But don't expect that to work for calculus- might as well be in Chinese!
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 104
Likes: 0
From: Birmingham, England (sometimes)
Genghis,
you could be me !
I considered Cambridge and ended up at Southampton too, mind you I went for electronics not aero...
All this talk of maths just serves to remind me that I can't remember using any of it since! But I suppose it is valuable to know, just in case someone crops up on PPRUNE and asks.
VnV
you could be me !
I considered Cambridge and ended up at Southampton too, mind you I went for electronics not aero...
All this talk of maths just serves to remind me that I can't remember using any of it since! But I suppose it is valuable to know, just in case someone crops up on PPRUNE and asks.
VnV
Moderator
Joined: Feb 2000
Aviation Qualifications: CPL
Posts: 14,480
Likes: 178
From: UK
To be fair, although Cambridge and I considered each other and came to similar conclusions - they did get in the first strike.
I do use maths, mostly algebra, simultaneous equations and numerical methods a lot. Calculus fairly regularly, differential equations about annually (guaranteeing that I always have to get the books out for those). Complex numbers, not since ETPS.
G
I do use maths, mostly algebra, simultaneous equations and numerical methods a lot. Calculus fairly regularly, differential equations about annually (guaranteeing that I always have to get the books out for those). Complex numbers, not since ETPS.
G
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 1,704
Likes: 1
From: Who can say?
I started off in Nuclear Physics in a Uni that was not so much red-brick as pre-stressed concrete. The nerds who really got on my nerves were the computing & cybernetics guys who used to do calculations in octal or hexadecimal... 
Moderator
Joined: Feb 2000
Aviation Qualifications: CPL
Posts: 14,480
Likes: 178
From: UK
The world is divided into 10 types of people; those who understand binary and those who don't.
(Actually not original, I nicked the line from Jeremy Paxman, quite incisive on his part I thought given he's only got an English degree.)
G
(Actually not original, I nicked the line from Jeremy Paxman, quite incisive on his part I thought given he's only got an English degree.)
G
Fleet Manager
Joined: Apr 2001
Aviation Qualifications: ATPL
Posts: 7,448
Likes: 310
From: various places .....
G,
Love it ......
Having started out on mainframes, I then started playing with the earliest crop of micros in the mid-70s (was it really that long ago ?) .. the only way to get anything done was to work low level ... almost all of it, of course, is now just a very, very vague memory. Now that PC and software houses have gone the way of an every year upgrade to force people to scrap the old gear and software which did a perfectly good job (albeit with not so many unnecessary, but flashy, bells and whistles), I guess that not many people at the user level bother with low level programming any more .... ?
I vaguely remember, as an undergrad, the department getting a PDP-whatever, which had, if I recall, 8k of RAM, a paper reader for input, and a teletype for output. Not to mention an HP-whatever, which had something in the order of a few hundred memory steps. ... now I have to pull out the manual to work out how to use the old slide rule ... sad, isn't it .... dinosaurs forever !!
Love it ......
Having started out on mainframes, I then started playing with the earliest crop of micros in the mid-70s (was it really that long ago ?) .. the only way to get anything done was to work low level ... almost all of it, of course, is now just a very, very vague memory. Now that PC and software houses have gone the way of an every year upgrade to force people to scrap the old gear and software which did a perfectly good job (albeit with not so many unnecessary, but flashy, bells and whistles), I guess that not many people at the user level bother with low level programming any more .... ?
I vaguely remember, as an undergrad, the department getting a PDP-whatever, which had, if I recall, 8k of RAM, a paper reader for input, and a teletype for output. Not to mention an HP-whatever, which had something in the order of a few hundred memory steps. ... now I have to pull out the manual to work out how to use the old slide rule ... sad, isn't it .... dinosaurs forever !!
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 394
Likes: 0
From: USA
Twas probably a PDP-8. I graduated before our high school got one so had to learn programming on a time share system using teletypes and 8bit paper tapes as a storage medium.
The university curricula sound about the same as American undergraduate programs, and I believe that includes Texas except maybe Aggies.
The university curricula sound about the same as American undergraduate programs, and I believe that includes Texas except maybe Aggies.
Moderator
Joined: Feb 2000
Aviation Qualifications: CPL
Posts: 14,480
Likes: 178
From: UK
For the benefit of foreign readers, A levels are taken at age 17 or 18 and are the English University entrance exams. (O levels were taken at 15 or 16 and are now called GCSEs).
G
G
I'matightbastard
Joined: Jul 2001
Posts: 1,747
Likes: 0
From: Texas
I vaguely remember, as an undergrad, the department getting a PDP-whatever, which had, if I recall, 8k of RAM, a paper reader for input, and a teletype for output.
Actually, that's exactly the machine I first learned on. A PDP-8e that had been upgraded from 4k to 8k with a paper tape reader and a teletype.
I made a tape once that when you ran it through the reader and echoed it to the teletype, it printed out the football results. I embeded a lot of NULLs in there too, so the print head bobbed up and down a lot and it looked just like the teletype on Grandstand.
It was a sign of things to come.
Oh yeah and not that A levels are so much easier now or anything, but this was back in junior school
Fleet Manager
Joined: Apr 2001
Aviation Qualifications: ATPL
Posts: 7,448
Likes: 310
From: various places .....
... ahhhh ........ dinosaur memories .... I think that you might be right, chaps ... PDP-8 rings a vague bell in the rapidly decaying grey matter .... as I recall, in our spare time, we all developed high skill levels in causing the paper output to print pictures of dubious qualities ....
I say there boy
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,065
Likes: 0
From: Somewhere
The way we're going we're going to be solving the Navier Stokes equation next...
Dimensional - Trinity is a good college, tends to be a bit insular because of its size, it's just a shame that 1st and 3rd (Trinity Boat Club) is crap.
Which fluid dynamics lecturer interviewed you - if they've been around for a bit they probably had a displeasure of teaching me?
cheers!
foggy (Selwyn College 1991)
Dimensional - Trinity is a good college, tends to be a bit insular because of its size, it's just a shame that 1st and 3rd (Trinity Boat Club) is crap.
Which fluid dynamics lecturer interviewed you - if they've been around for a bit they probably had a displeasure of teaching me?
cheers!
foggy (Selwyn College 1991)
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 1,704
Likes: 1
From: Who can say?
Uh oh. I may be the baby of the family here. In my day (this was at university) we had a couple of PDP11's interfaced with an IBM4130. Still had teletypes. I remember the first time I saw a dot matrix printer. I thought "SH!T that's fast!". <sigh> Lost innocence!
I may be the baby of the family here. In my day (this was at university) we had a couple of PDP11's interfaced with an IBM4130. Still had teletypes. I remember the first time I saw a dot matrix printer. I thought "SH!T that's fast!". <sigh> Lost innocence!
Cunning Artificer
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 3,125
Likes: 7
From: The spiritual home of DeHavilland
Did someone mention dinosaurs?
I still have my original Faber-Castell ENG-II portable. It was lightning fast that old "Ziggy stick" although the processor speed wasn't matched by a decent RAM capacity. It could only store the current operation and there was no cache. This wasn't too much of a disadvantage - you could always do a hard copy data dump at regular intervals. At least it worked anywhere, anytime and had no batteries or power supply to go wrong or die on you at a critical moment. Finally it could be used to draw a decent straight line or even measure things, as long as you were prepared to count in 32nds of an inch - none of that decimal nonsense on the British model of the good old Faber! I can still solve complex trigonometrical functions on it (power calculations generally) faster than most people can type the input data on a keyboard.
Its hard to imagine that until the late seventies, almost all design calculations were done with a slide rule.
**************************
Through difficulties to the cinema
I still have my original Faber-Castell ENG-II portable. It was lightning fast that old "Ziggy stick" although the processor speed wasn't matched by a decent RAM capacity. It could only store the current operation and there was no cache. This wasn't too much of a disadvantage - you could always do a hard copy data dump at regular intervals. At least it worked anywhere, anytime and had no batteries or power supply to go wrong or die on you at a critical moment. Finally it could be used to draw a decent straight line or even measure things, as long as you were prepared to count in 32nds of an inch - none of that decimal nonsense on the British model of the good old Faber! I can still solve complex trigonometrical functions on it (power calculations generally) faster than most people can type the input data on a keyboard.
Its hard to imagine that until the late seventies, almost all design calculations were done with a slide rule.
**************************
Through difficulties to the cinema
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 104
Likes: 0
From: Birmingham, England (sometimes)
Blacksheep,
WOW a Faber-Castell!!!, I used to yearn to have one of those, ended up with a British Thornton , good enough for most things up to A level but the plastic cases were naff (I still have it, together with a neat wooden box that my dear old dad made for it).
I also remember going to a maths course for a week at Nottingham University while I was doing As where we used mechanical 'wind-up' calculators to do the stats. section.
Computer-wise, cut my teeth on an Elliot 803 then progressed to a PDP-8i: a six-foot rack of it. When the later PDP-8e came along we were amazed when a bloke turned up with a box under his arm and said 'where do you want your new computer putting,
then?'
But slide rules and computers can't really DO quadratics can they?
VnV...
WOW a Faber-Castell!!!, I used to yearn to have one of those, ended up with a British Thornton , good enough for most things up to A level but the plastic cases were naff (I still have it, together with a neat wooden box that my dear old dad made for it).
I also remember going to a maths course for a week at Nottingham University while I was doing As where we used mechanical 'wind-up' calculators to do the stats. section.
Computer-wise, cut my teeth on an Elliot 803 then progressed to a PDP-8i: a six-foot rack of it. When the later PDP-8e came along we were amazed when a bloke turned up with a box under his arm and said 'where do you want your new computer putting,
then?'
But slide rules and computers can't really DO quadratics can they?
VnV...
Moderator
Joined: Feb 2000
Aviation Qualifications: CPL
Posts: 14,480
Likes: 178
From: UK
My 12" British Thornton still lives on my desk and gets used for occasional light relief or when somebody's borrowed my calculator.
As it happens, yes, the higher level Casios will solve quadratics and simultaneous equations - a facility that I probably use at least annually ;-) When I did some AFCS design work once I found the high end casio calculator's ability to manipulate 6x6 matirices particularly useful. With the best will in the world, and much as I love it, my slide rule just doesn't do that.
G
As it happens, yes, the higher level Casios will solve quadratics and simultaneous equations - a facility that I probably use at least annually ;-) When I did some AFCS design work once I found the high end casio calculator's ability to manipulate 6x6 matirices particularly useful. With the best will in the world, and much as I love it, my slide rule just doesn't do that.
G
Cunning Artificer
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 3,125
Likes: 7
From: The spiritual home of DeHavilland
Going back to the mathematics - boring old quadratics and stuff - I find that statistics is far more important in everyday Technical Services work than any of the stuff I learned back in basics. Given the importance of statistics in reliability analysis, I often wonder why we were taught only the most rudimentary statistics in our engineering training - a PhD student of Linguistics knows more about statistics than the typical engineer. My first year economics started with a book called "Elementary Statistics for the Social Sciences" The first eight chapters were fairly easy reading, the remaining twelve took me to places I'd never been before. Then came Advanced Statistics! I find that I use all that stuff more than any of the mathematics that I learned in engineering studies.
I'd like to see more statistics included into the secondary school syllabus - its used in almost every field of endeavour today but is second only to sociology in the list of the most misunderstood subjects.
**************************
Through difficulties to the cinema
I'd like to see more statistics included into the secondary school syllabus - its used in almost every field of endeavour today but is second only to sociology in the list of the most misunderstood subjects.
**************************
Through difficulties to the cinema
Guest
Posts: n/a
Statistics ? ---- "A numerical form of wish fulfillment". Just joking ! (an average joke ?).
I have a cylindrical slide rule, found in a junk shop. No identification, except "N 1010" on the bottom end, "OTIS KING'S PATENT No 183723" on the scale and "Made in England" on the top end. Steel hand hold, brass sleeve, ivory plastic scales. 6" compressed, 10" extended, 1" diameter.
Does anyone know of the whereabouts of a set of instructions, please, either for this model, or just a general description e.g. on the net ?
Apologies is off-topic, but you already seem to have got to the root of the quadratics question.
I have a cylindrical slide rule, found in a junk shop. No identification, except "N 1010" on the bottom end, "OTIS KING'S PATENT No 183723" on the scale and "Made in England" on the top end. Steel hand hold, brass sleeve, ivory plastic scales. 6" compressed, 10" extended, 1" diameter.
Does anyone know of the whereabouts of a set of instructions, please, either for this model, or just a general description e.g. on the net ?
Apologies is off-topic, but you already seem to have got to the root of the quadratics question.