Calculus Final

If I ever become a Calculus professor I’m going to give my students one problem on their final exam.

1) Integrate the following (Note: no partial credit will be granted)

You Might Be an Engineer

The top 0001 0100 signs that you might be an engineer….

1. You have no life and you can prove it mathematically.
2. You’ve actually used every single function on your graphing calculator.
3. You chuckle whenever someone says “centrifugal force”.
4. You know vector calculus but you can’t remember how to do long division.
5. The sales people at the local computer store can”t answer any of your questions.
6. You bring a computer manual / technical journal as vacation reading.
7. You know the glass is neither half full nor half empty; it’s simply twice as big as it needs to be.
8. You think in “math”.
9. You consider ANY non-engineering course “easy”.
10. You can translate English into Binary.
11. A three year old asks why the sky is blue and you try to explain atmospheric absorption theory.
12. It is sunny and 70 degrees outside, and you are working on a computer.
13. At an air show you know how fast the skydivers are falling.
14. You can recite the value of pi to one hundred digits.
15. You have a habit of destroying things in order to see how they work.
16. The “fun” center of your brain has deteriorated from lack of use.
17. You carry on a one-hour debate over the expected results of a test that only takes five minutes to run.
18. You can type 70 words per minute but you can’t read your own handwriting.
19. You assume that a “horse” is a “sphere” in order to make the math easier.
20. You understood more than five of these jokes.

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The Exponential Function

I have been too busy with school lately to write anything. So here is some filler content, my favorite math joke.

The cocky exponential function e^x is strolling along the road insulting the functions he sees walking by. He scoffs at a wandering polynomial for the shortness of its Taylor series. He snickers at a passing smooth function of compact support and its glaring lack of a convergent power series about many of its points. He positively laughs as he passes |x| for being nondifferentiable at the origin. He smiles, thinking to himself, “Damn, it’s great to be e^x. I’m real analytic everywhere. I’m my own derivative. I blow up faster than anybody and shrink faster too. All the other functions suck.”

Lost in his own egomania, he collides with the constant function 3, who is running in terror in the opposite direction.

“What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you look where you’re going?” demands e^x. He then sees the fear in 3’s eyes and says “You look terrified!”

“I am!” says the panicky 3. “There’s a differential operator just around the corner. If he differentiates me, I’ll be reduced to nothing! I’ve got to get away!” With that, 3 continues to dash off.

“Stupid constant,” thinks e^x. “I’ve got nothing to fear from a differential operator. He can keep differentiating me as long as he wants, and I’ll still be there.”

So he scouts off to find the operator and gloat in his smooth glory. He rounds the corner and defiantly introduces himself to the operator. “Hi. I’m e^x.”

“Hi. I’m d / dy.”

Courtesy of Komplexify

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