I had one student in my last years who was quite functional, but the Aspergers definitely was an issue. He took something like 5 classes from me, but the biggest problem was that he wasn't nearly as good as he thought he was, and his interruptions bugged other students (and seriously bugged other faculty).

I never did study ahead, @ILike.

One of the biggest challenges I face in classes is (sometimes) being asked to read something out loud, or present in front of the class, or speak to the teacher. Everyone else seems to does it so naturally

Hmm, my student had no issues with speaking whatsoever.

@TedShifrin I see. I have never used WeBWorK as a student myself. Let me play with the system first. Maybe there are some configuration options so that students cannot ask questions. I'll contact you again once I'm familiar with setting it up as an administrator.

There's a reason why I almost never speak in class

Do you have problems reading?

That said, I generally encourage a lot of student participation. I had a different student, who may well have been autistic, who was even in the class with the 3500 videos (not 3510), who constantly asked questions that were off track and quite disruptive.

I can read just fine, but I prefer pictures over words

Yeah, @user726941, good question. I noticed that that student did not read/parse carefully. He would often miss test questions because he didn't read carefully enough to answer the right question.

They say a thousand words :P

Oh, so Rudin will be the perfect book for you, @Seiya. /sarcasm

@GratefulDisciple Don't waste too much of your precious time on this, but it's an interesting thought!

Whoever invented language I hope went to Hell

while attending classes at my college, I learn how not to teach.

That can be helpful.

Learn by contradiction.

the college where I did my UG from had a feedback system at the end of a semester. In the feedback form, one could anonymously write to the teacher. But that's not the case here.

@TedShifrin I'm so bad at communication that I couldn't even ask the teacher to let me sit at the front as the writing on the white boards was basically blurred/invisible to me from where I was sitting at. I basically did nothing in that class because of it

Write a note.

@ペガサスSeiya Get glasses?

@XanderHenderson I'll need laser surgery

@user726941 I just don't care anymore. Let them do whatever they do in class. I just sit at one of the back seats and do self study.

Very few people "need" laser surgery. Unless you have a fairly rare condition, glasses should suffice.

that helps.

Have you tried glasses?

^

@XanderHenderson yes, lenses with -6.0DD. Still not clear enough. That's severe myopia

In the US colleges have a whole office to help students with learning disabilities; they set up lines of communication with the professors, arrange for help, testing, etc.

@Koro I would be very upset to find a student doing that in my classes.

You wouldn't notice a student trying to hide from view, would you?

@TedShifrin Yeah, but that is because the feds mandated it via ADA, IDEA, and other bits and bobbles of legislation. Are there similar laws in [insert @ペガサスSeiya's country here]?

@Xander Probably this year's House of Representatives will do their best to dismantle such things.

@ペガサスSeiya: I took an elective course on 'writing systems of the world' during my undergraduation. So the teacher had started teaching Japanese writing system. His wife was japanese and he brought her to the class to teach writing the Japanese. She asked-'how many of you know some japanese words?' Some said-arigatou gozaimasu, some said-itta taki mas. I thought I should also say something.

@TedShifrin Oh? You don't think that they are just gonna have SCOTUS do it for them?

I told you the other day about my student who had severe, severe vision problems. He sat at the front of the class with binoculars, and I printed him super-huge exams. He is now a PhD in CS who is a college professor.

@Koro I'd have said "Yare Yare"

I said-'Omaiwa'...😅 Then I stopped. And she said -'you must have heard it in a cartoon'.

@TedShifrin Thanks. After covering the content of the course and making sure you understood it, you wouldn't discourage self-studying ahead with a book though/it's fine to study ahead for your next courses, right?

@XanderHenderson No doubt. Grrr. How quickly we have disintegrated.

@TedShifrin I took multivariable calculus with a guy who was blind. I was always shocked at how well he understood things, given how much I was struggling, and he couldn't see the pictures!

@TedShifrin Did he ask to be sat at the front?

@ILike ... This conversation is pointless. I am only one person with one person's opinions. Do what you want to do.

He came to class one day, very excited about his stripy pants. We all said "Dude... those are just brown pants..."

@Koro how about "Yamete Kudasai!"

But... they were corduroy. So super stripy.

@ペガサスSeiya I then searched the whole phrase -Omaiwa nani ... and realized that it's a super rude way of saying 'who are you?'

@TedShifrin Sorry. Thanks for your answers!

So I was glad that I didn't say the full sentence.

@ペガサスSeiya I knew him personally because his dad was a colleague, but he had all the arrangements made through the office for disabilities. Of course, in my case, he didn't need to do all that; I would have made the arrangements myself. But that way other students know things are fair across the board.

because with subtitles in some tv shows, the sentence is usually translated to 'Who are you?'.

@Xander The French mathematician Morin who figured out how to turn the sphere inside-out (once Smale proved it was doable) was blind.

@Koro Omae is generally a ruse way to say "You"

but that's not the exact meaning of that. It's more like 'who the heck are you?'

@Koro never say "kisama" when addressing someone in Japanese

@ペガサスSeiya yeah, I figured it on that day.

in a company where I worked, sometimes we had email exchanges with some consultants in Japan. They would write 'my name' -san.

@TedShifrin if he had vision problems I wonder if he struggles with writing code

I realized that 'san' is more common that I thought. I thought that san is for people that you know very well.

and is informal.

@Koro I'm referred to as "My Name"-San every day here

but it appears not.

It is formal

My classmates call me "My Name"-kun

not sure about chan though

or kun

sama :-)

Kun is for your peers. Chan is for someone much younger than you

@ペガサスSeiya He actually wrote a computer system (patented I think) that would read to him aloud. That was ages ago. I know he worked on more AI stuff in graduate school.

@XanderHenderson you mentioned you had dyscalculia, was that why you struggled?

@ペガサスSeiya That was part of it.

@XanderHenderson the other part? It was a hard class?

Though, to be honest, I didn't struggle that much with multivariable calc.

@TedShifrin you probably have better vision than I do

@TedShifrin that's a good thing. Some don't even turn their face back to see what's happening behind!!

@XanderHenderson It doesn't seem that challenging, but that's just my few months (at best) of studying speaking.

just writing on board, and facing board all the time while they're at it.

I had a woman (who ultimately transferred from UGA to Yale and majored in art, I believe) in my multivariable math class who said she couldn't visualize 3-D stuff. By the middle of the course, she was drawing on my board with colored chalk better 3-D pictures than I could do. Suffice to say, she visualized just fine.

@Koro Such people should be fired. Especially if all they do is copy the textbook on the board.

@TedShifrin I hope it doesn't take too much effort for me (to do the installation and to administer the system). Do you remember the latest WeBWorK and PG versions successfully compiled your code? Here's the Release Notes history along with some dates.

@TedShifrin wish I had that kind of art people to hang out with

@TedShifrin Oh, god... the first time I taught multivariable calculus (which was also one of the first college classes I taught, as a masters student), I gave a great lecture. I was drawing beautiful pictures, using all the chalks, things were colored and shaded. I finished that lecture and felt like I was the king of the world.

As soon as class was over, a student walked up to me and said "Yo... Xander. So... uh... I'm colorblind. What the hell were you on about today?"

I was crushed. :(

Not surprisingly, multivariable was always my favorite course to teach (among calculi). I taught regular first- and second-semester only a couple of times.

@XanderHenderson Oo :(.

@XanderHenderson if I were you I'd hold up 3 colored chalks and ask "which one's the red?"

Did he really say 'Yo Xander'?

Oh, I had issues with color-blind students. I actually tried to remember to start the class by asking if anyone had issues (although that may be against the law to ask).

@TedShifrin My favorite of the calculi is Calc II. I really like sequences and series.

@Koro Yes.

I like the physical applications in calc 2. Sequences and series for students who don't know what an estimate is or what a limit is is so unfair.

@GratefulDisciple No, I don't remember. Let me see if I can deduce it from my files.

@TedShifrin It is probably illegal to ask, but I still do ask every semester. I use a lot of color in my lectures, and if I know that someone is red/green or blue/yellow colorblind, then I can easily make accomodations.

@Koro I'm jealous at that kind of confidence

@TedShifrin I use sequences and series to, essentially, reteach the whole notion of a limit.

Do you start from 0.999... =1.

Infinite decimals were fun

@user726941 That is one of the early examples.

coolio

@GratefulDisciple No, no notation there (of course). This was back in the days of 2008-2013, so probably around the 2.3 era. I know our support people did update semi-regularly.

I don't like writing on paper

I'm gonna get a whiteboard

@TedShifrin OK, thanks. That's a good enough starting point for me. From the release notes I would know if there is breaking changes. Since you last taught the course in Spring 2015, Version 2.10 (Jan2015) should work.

You could even build an app for the course :P

Funded by lesliecoin.

Leslie isn't gonna agree to that

@GratefulDisciple At the very least, someone has to add students to the class roll for things to be accessible.

Well, we can always go around leslie and get munchkin to do it.

he agrees to all transactions involving his coin

@TedShifrin I keep forgetting who Munchkin is

Leslie's bratty daughter.

I gave her that name; it seems to have stuck.

Munchkin means small eater.

It does? To me it's just a small person.

::munch munch::

Isn't munchkin that thing made out of donuts?

Yeah, but it comes from the Wizard of Oz. They were just little people.

@TedShifrin Yes, I'll have to study the admin manual to see the options to do a self-add to the class roll, in case you don't want to do it. Or to have an interested person to contact you.

@TedShifrin small in age or size? If its physical size then many people can't be munchkins here

@GratefulDisciple I think that may get out of hand!

A Munchkin is a native of the fictional Munchkin Country in the Oz books by American author L. Frank Baum. They first appear in the classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) where they welcome Dorothy Gale to their city in Oz. The Munchkins are described as being the same height as Dorothy and they wear only shades of blue clothing, as blue is the Munchkins' favorite color.

For the win.

Let's make a bet. I'm the tallest person here. I'll give Lesliecoin to anyone who proves me wrong

I am about munchkin size.

@TedShifrin I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me play with the system first and get back to you (may not for the next few weeks).

Sure thing, @Grateful. Don't feel obligated to waste your time.

@TedShifrin So, you're one of those munchkins from the book?

Yes, I was in Kansas in 1908.

Kansas vs Arkansas

> But some Baum scholars see a possible inspiration in Münchner Kindl, the name of the emblem of the city of Munich (German München) or in German Männchen, literally "little man," which is cognate with mannequin.

Oh, of course, should have thought of the München connection.

I hate whoever invented kanji

again with the "hate" word?

@user726941 there's a lot that I hate

I see.

I HATE HATE!

I LOVE LOVE!

Independent events are hard to teach

No matter how many people you explain it to, explaining it to the next person will be just as hard

Did computer architecture change fundamentally since the construction of computers? I know Charles Babbage's difference engine was essentially a computer

But like they have always been able to add,multiply, subtract, and divide right?

(not counting the earliest forms that may have only had addition/subtraction)

Did we ever add tetration or something else?

@AkivaWeinberger Are you ever truly sure?

nvm it's a sum

nvm I was right

@XanderHenderson I love to hate

@Obliv some mobile ARM chips suck at division

@Ted turns out the Cech cohomology of the sheafification can be larger than that of the presheaf

an example are constant presheaves on the "pseudo-circle" $X$ obtained by collapsing both open semi-circles to a point each (yielding a space with 2 closed and 2 open points)

mildly non-satisfying as that space is non-Hausdorff

it does not work on the actual circle, because that has "enough opens" to refine as needed, the pseudo-circle on the other hand has very few opens

I would assume the conclusion to hold in sufficiently regular scenarios, but I haven't a clue what "sufficiently regular" should mean

Ugh.

Sorta like how for manifolds/varieties we can compute with a nice cover, never passing to the direct limit.

Ah

@Obliv I think there's "fused multiply-add" which is f(a,b,c)=ab+c, which helps with numerical stability in some places (like if c is very close to -ab)

which some chips can do natively?

Otherwise (using [.] to represent rounding to the nearest floating-point number) you're doing [[a*b]+c] instead of [a*b+c]

(I mean I guess from the rounding perspective it's enough to have an algorithm for computing [a*b+c] instead of [[a*b]+c]; having the chip be able to do it in one cycle is probably just for speed and such)

(but I'm not an expert in this)

Ultra simple question: Similar matrices have the same eigenvalues. But ((0,1),(1,0)) and ((0,2),(2,0)) are similar and don't have the same eigenvalues, what am I missing?

or is there any place I can ask this? Sorry if I am interrupting anything here

why do you think they're similar?

A is just a factor times B

yeah nvm english wikipedia says they are equal up to a different basis so its ok

german wiki just says they are equal so I was hella confused

but they probably meant the endomorphisms or the matrices in some abstract sense that I dont get

I don't think either wiki is wrong

one being a scalar multiple of another does not mean they are similar

why not, I can just multiply A by id*2 which is an isomorphism

that doesn't change the matrix

Maybe I'm missing something, but to me, similarity means "same thing in a different basis". Multiplying a matrix by a constant clearly (visually) makes the matrix do a different thing, so it can't be similar to the old matrix

@Novice that makes sense but where exactly is the flaw in my logic

by id*2 I mean (2,0)(0,2)

what does similarity mean to you? to me, in terms of matrices, it means there is an invertible matrix S such that B=SAS^{-1}

A and B are similar if A=SBS^-1

Ya

@Thorgott yes

agree

You'd have to multiply by $(2I)^{-1}$ on the left and $2I$ on the right, wouldn't you?

ok, but you haven't exhibited such an $S$

S= id*2 and S^-1 = id * 1/2

@Novice how do I get the tex to render btw?

But then once you pull the factors out, all you've shown is that $A$ is similar to itself, right?

true

oof

Novice is hitting the nail on the head

math.ucla.edu/~robjohn/math/mathjax.html

thanks so much omg

From a slightly more abstract perspective, you've got isomorphic vector spaces V and V' and maps A:V->V, B:V'->V' and you want that isomorphism to take A to B

but in this case V=V'

OK, maybe this is a very abstract perspective

its probably a sign that its too late

@AkivaWeinberger kinda haha

@Novice ty

before I log off just wanna say that you guys lowkey made my evening lol. the abstract perspective was also nice.