Disclaimer: I have had coffee for the first time this year and coffee=drugs for Zedas
. Read the following at your own risk because I am completely buzzed on coffee and I cannot keep my thoughts in order... I'ma go do some maths for now
Not an Edit: Cool, I can use emoticons!
Hehe, I cannot seem to get things like Linear Algebra (!_!) or things like that, but all of the stuff I work on I do independently.
The problem with that is that before this semester of college, I was never exposed to formal stuff (or at least rarely exposed), so my notation tends to be a little on the questionable side
The other problem is that whenever I go to Wolfram to see if my ideas already exist, I cannot find answers because I cannot read any of it and I don't know what to look for. For example, back in ninth grade I got super excited because I was playing around on my calc with this really cool sine function thingamabob and I started noticing a pattern. By the end of the night I found a way to do things like finding the exact value of sin(171pi/1024)! That November, I was going to a math competition and I showed off my cool formula to a professor and they didn't recognise it, but they said "Here's my e-mail and check Wolfram.com for" and he used a term I forgot, but it described taking the square root of the square root of the... you get the idea. Eventually I found out it was just some random and obscure pattern. Since then I found another method, but I cannot find it on wolfram
Another example is last year (26 January 2010) I cracked open an old trig book that a friend gave me in seventh grade when a little slip of paper fell out that said N=.5A
2+.5A and I had a drawing of bricks next to it and I remembered, "Oh, that was the day my mother had to take me to the bank with her and I decided to count bricks..." I then got distracted and I counted at the top in the center 1 brick. Then there were two bricks below that touched that brick. Then three and four and five, et cetera. I spent that day finding a way to make an equation for it (I felt special because I taught myself Algebra using an old TI-99 in fourth grade... there is a nice story, there, too). Back on topic... I eventually worked out that if I took the number of bricks there were (heightwise) and divided it by two, I could add .5 and multiply by the number of bricks tall it was to get all of the bricks! Anywho, I found that slip of paper and I was waiting to take my French midterm so I thought "Huh, what if I had a pyramid that had one brick on top, 4 below that and 9 below that, and so on..." So I got to working on that and I found the equation for that. It that hit me after the exam that I was finding an equation for the sum of X
2! Then I tried doing that with X
3 and I found that and then I got home and for the rest of that week I worked my way up to X
6. So blah, blah, blah, I worked at it for a long time and then put it aside for the month of March. The work to find X
7 Had been so much that I decided to instead work at finding a pattern before attempting anything more. Then, suddenly, I found a pattern in the first week of April! So that night I worked my way up to X
9 and over the next three days up to X
15. The problem was, the pattern was still difficult for me to grasp and so I took another month to find an algorithm to find the coefficients I needed and within 15 minutes, I was able to expand my collection of equations from the sum of X
15 up to X
47! When I finally got internet, I posted
this over on UTI using an example my poor TI-89 could handle.
So yeah, I actually am not all that good at math, but math is one of those few things that I can get absolutely consumed in and I am bound to eventually come across things. That was how I noticed that the diagonals in Pascal's triangle were simply the sums of the previous diagonal. Of course, I used the algorithm I came up with before to find those sums, so I didn't see that they followed X(X+1)(X+2)...(X+n-1)/n!, so that will be interesting to explore! There is so much that I randomly encounter and I don't even have a brain for math !_! I just have the devotion and it is the only thing I have the devotion for :'(
EDIT: Sorry for any glaring grammatical errors... read the note at the top for my excuse...