Cross-tabs, calculations, etc ...

... in Crystal drive me nuts. Debugging them is fun (like processing matricies of numbers, a good memory of what I sort-of learned in doing graphics and tossed in somewhere else during my Math degree. Whoever said that MATH311 (can't remember if it was PMAT or AMAT) was required for a General Math degree is nuts. It's more required for a PMAT degree. So maybe that's how I accidentally ended up with a PMAT minor, even though the only PMAT courses I lay claim to were MATH271 (required for all CPSC majors), MATH311 (Linear Methods II) and PMAT 415 (Set Theory). Not that I would actually lay claim to having that minor, although YES, I do have 10 annoying math courses under my belt. Blissfully do not remember anything to do with Calculus, although I went through Calculus I-IV. So now I'm number crunching again, but nothing like what I went through for my math courses.

Strange, that I barely remember my trig deriviatives... how did they go again?

sin(x) -> cos(x)
cos(x) -> -sin(x)
tan(x) -> sqr (sec(x))
sec(x) -> sec(x) * tan(x)
csc(x) -> - csc(x) * cot(x)
cot(x) -> - sqr(csc(x))

I actually could've rattled them off by rote once upon a time. Come to think of it, I can still rattle off the order of sharps and flats off a music score, not to mention which scale has which # of sharps and flats. Now, can I still play a decent tune on a keyboard is a totally different story.

Once upon a time I could spit proofs out of my rear end for things like set theory axioms. Now that was one hell of a painful assignment. Nothing like trying to prove 10 set theory axioms, and because you knew they were true, you could forget about trying to find a counterexample and thus was your easy way out of proving something that was already proven somewhere else. I likened it to math-type BS because essentially that's what it was. Kinda like proving why the sqr root of 2 was an irrational number. My favorite was my professor's proof for why the power set of a power set is infinite because the power set of a set is all the numbers in the set plus it's combinations. Now if you take the power set of that you get again all the elements in a set (which was the numbers in the previous set plus it's combinations) and the combinations of that, and thus no matter how many times you take the power of a powerset, the number of elements continue to grow for infinity. Hence, a powerset of a powerset is an infinite set. He did this rather comically. He was also on the board of NSERC grants so periodically when we got to class there was no professor in sight. If there was one class that had me quaking in my boots it was that one. I still have the textbook for it.