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Poisson's Equation

mattferraro.dev

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Re: Poisson's Equation

#111

Post by nimish »

lordnacho wrote: post #104
pfortuny wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. 2-to-1 student-teacher ratio?? Where is that? Totally stunned.

Oxford, and the place out in the marshes. It's not that there aren't massive lectures, tutorials are in addition to those. Not bad value actually, despite what I said earlier. You do get to ask about whatever your mental block is, and the tutor is gonna know. But studying is time consuming, an hour is not as much time as it seems. You probably learn the most on your own, which nowadays ought to mean on the internet.

Yeah, the idea was/is that you spend 5-10hrs studying for every hour in tutorial. You got what you put in.

Re: Poisson's Equation

#112

Post by lordnacho »

pfortuny wrote: post #108
lordnacho wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oxford, and the place out in the marshes. It's not that there aren't massive lectures, tutorials are in addition to those. Not bad value actually, despite what I said earlier. You do get to ask about whatever your mental block is, and the tutor is gonna know. But studying is time consuming, an hour is not as much time as it seems. You probably learn the most on your own, which nowadays ought to mean on the internet.

Oh I thought it was accross the pond. I knew about Oxford etc. but for whatever reason I took it to be in the Colonies.

On that side I suspect some of the smaller liberal arts colleges are your best bet for small classes. But I'm no expert on the overseas possessions.

Re: Poisson's Equation

#113

Post by bradstewart »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #56

I could have used this 32(!) years ago when I was struggling in college. (This and 3b1b.) It amazes me just how many key topics were so inaccessible to the majority of the class at engineering school. I base this on observations from group study sessions and the hyper-aggressive test curves. I knew lots of people who never got the hang of div/grad/curl, or a Jacobians, or eignenvectors, or Z-transforms... These are k…

For me at least, at a large public university with a highly-rated engineering department, it mostly came down to math courses being taught by TAs/new faculty who were not primarily interested in teaching.

When I had actual engineering dept courses on these topics (frequency domain comes to mind), I grok'ed it pretty quickly. But the math lectures were basically spent doing practice problems from the book, without any sort of insight or practical application.

I just wanted to build shit in college.

Re: Poisson's Equation

#115

Post by wildmanx »

franciscop wrote: post #39
wildmanx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a typical issue with HN posts. Some poor soul wrote a somewhat competent and maybe even lengthy blog post / article about something they really care about and are knowledgeable about. It may be directed at a specific audience, or maybe just screaming into the void to record down some insight they had for themselves to read again later, or similar. And they use a more-than-necessary general title like "the bes…

From the poster sharer username here in HN it seems "the poor author" is also the one sharing it here, so it seems this blog post is at least partly directed to the general HN audience, not like the hypothetical situation you are placing here. So the whole "It's just not for the overall HN crowd" is probably not a valid point? I found it a throwback to my university years, but I did study Industrial Engineering with…

What's getting confusing with this discussion is that the title has changed. Now it's just "Poisson's Equation". But before it was "Most Powerful Tool not yet in your Toolbox" which was really off topic for a mainly sw dev crowd.

That the author himself submitted it (under that original title?) would then be his own "fault". But my general original point remains.

Re: Poisson's Equation

#116

Post by Robotbeat »

I have used Poisson’s Equation recently. Actually, something similar. Been coding up some thermal conductivity calculations form scratch.

What’s nice about the Laplace equation is that there are some exact analytical solutions in some situations which is really helpful for validating numerical codes and sanity checking. It’s also simple enough to implement in an Excel spreadsheet, Color coding the cells to indicate temperature. Good sort of “no code” example of the concept.

Re: Poisson's Equation

#117

Post by amoorthy »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #56

I could have used this 32(!) years ago when I was struggling in college. (This and 3b1b.) It amazes me just how many key topics were so inaccessible to the majority of the class at engineering school. I base this on observations from group study sessions and the hyper-aggressive test curves. I knew lots of people who never got the hang of div/grad/curl, or a Jacobians, or eignenvectors, or Z-transforms... These are k…

Agreed! It's one reason I'm bullish about our children learning and applying math better than us.

Btw, 3 Blue 1 Brown's videos on linear algebra [1] are similarly awesome and of course his video on Fourier is magnificent [2]. Another awesome math explanation is on game theory by Nicky case [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x.... (you'll finally learn what a determinant is!) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY [3] https://ncase.me/trust/

Re: Poisson's Equation

#118

Post by just_temp »

vlmutolo wrote: post #78

> It is customary when simulating heat flow to use a wacky color palette where red is hot and blue is cold, with all kinds of intermediate colors in between In an otherwise excellent article, this is the only issue I could find. We really need to stop using/recommending/normalizing rainbow color maps (i.e. jet). They actively confuse readers by creating visual artifacts that aren't actually in the data. This article…

Can not agree with this more, if people want to plot something that is linear please use a perceptually linear colormap! Just a one second glance at the Mona Lisa in rainbow/Jet is enough to make you gouge your eyes out. https://peterjamesthomas.com/2017/09/15/hurricanes-and-data-...

For a more technical description the information behind the newer matplotlib defaults, particularly the scipy talk, is great. https://bids.github.io/colormap/

And for those that do not like the matplotlib options, colorcet provides a wider range of alternatives that are not trash (unlike Jet) https://colorcet.holoviz.org/index.html

Re: Poisson's Equation

#119

Post by msie »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #56

I could have used this 32(!) years ago when I was struggling in college. (This and 3b1b.) It amazes me just how many key topics were so inaccessible to the majority of the class at engineering school. I base this on observations from group study sessions and the hyper-aggressive test curves. I knew lots of people who never got the hang of div/grad/curl, or a Jacobians, or eignenvectors, or Z-transforms... These are k…

Reminds me of the article I read yesterday about the importance of drills: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27735292
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