@Randal'Thor I had fun putting together the answer, but spent entirely too long on it. Imma flunk my maths class and it'll be all your fault. Ironic, considering that you're a mathemagician by trade
@verbose Oh, I forgot to ask: what kind of maths course are you taking?
And thanks for the answer! I was expecting one from you :-)
I was even going to ask in a comment if the Rāmopākhyāna was ever published separately, like the Bhagavad Gita, or if the Rāmāyaṇa is people's go-to for a stand-alone story about Rama. But you already answered that along with everything else.
@Randal'Thor Somehow I'm imagining an unimaginative calculus 1 for English majors class where an old American professor writes special case equations on the blackboard, like what the integral of x·ln x dx is, with basically no material that the students will ever use or background that they learn something from.
@Randal'Thor precalculus I. It's not difficult per se, it's just ... very different from what I usually do. And I haven't done any actual maths in decades. The hope is to actually take calculus at some point
@b_jonas I guess I don't know what use I'll ever have for maths, but I'm not sure what use I ever have for literature either.
I mean, I don't see "useless" as a good reason not to take a class.
@verbose What is in this precalculus 1? Did they tell you about complex numbers and how every one-variable polynomial factorizes to the product of linears?
@b_jonas yes, they have, but I actually knew that from before
@b_jonas Oh I'm certain it doesn't. Owing to the peculiar education "streaming" one has in India, I haven't taken maths since tenth grade. The highest maths class I took was Trigonometry. I never got as far as calculus. I am taking precalculus simply because it has been long enough that I need to brush up on stuff I have forgotten how to do.
I mean, I used to program, but couldn't have ever proved to you why one algorithm was more efficient than another, for example.
I do understand big-O notation but I can't prove things.
@verbose What is in this precalculus 1? Did they tell you about complex numbers and how every one-variable polynomial factorizes to the product of linears?
previous knowledge. Not high school maths class, but some CS stuff
Either that or I read Calvin and Hobbes where Hobbes speaks of "imaginary numbers like eleventeen and twenty-twelve" and I looked up imaginary numbers and fell down a rabbit hole
Oh the mention of Ṛṣyasringa brings to mind a funny story about how my husband grew used to the vagaries of Indian mythology. One of the chief characters in the Mahābhārata is a lady named Satyavati. She is the daughter of a fisherman and guts fish all day. So she always carries the odor of fish with her. So one of her nicknames is Matsyagandhā
Zephyr came across the name Matsyagandhā and asked me what it meant. I said, "the lady who smells of fish." He refused to believe me and insisted I was pulling his leg / making it up.
A couple of years later, he came across the name Ṛṣyasringa and asked what that meant. I said, "the dude with antlers." And his response was simply, "oh, okay." I took that contrast as an indication of how much more familiar he had become with the stories I grew up with
That reminds me of an interesting observation (I think made by BESW in here?) about how some mythologies, notably Native American, usually have character names translated morpheme-by-morpheme when the stories are translated into English, while others like ancient Greek (and Sanskrit/Indian, evidently) keep the names more or less in the original language.
@Randal'Thor Yes, someone mentioned that about Chinese legendarium, mostly because the phonetic transcriptions from Chinese are not very faithful and a bit silly.
@b_jonas Solving ∫ x ln x dx is something that I've found useful a few times — it comes up in the runtime of algorithms that need to sort arrays of different lengths. There's an example in this Stack Overflow answer
This passage is from The Children's Bach by Helen Garner
Elizabeth used the presence of Vicki at her place as an excuse for
sleeping nearly every night at Philip’s. He did not mind: he was not the kind
of person who could be bothered minding. But he stayed out later, fell into
strange beds in ho...