How was the DG yesterday, I couldn't attend due to crap timing. F*****g Liberty Park, >_< I'm so grateful they managed to find me somewhere that takes 40 mins by bus in the evening.

It was excellent. You weren't the only regular not to attend. Luckily the guy doing the talk brought a large group of people to watch. Great talk interesting, much learned. Even if it was maths history.

Basically first half was the history of people who had developed the capacity to make large calculations in their head.

The second half was nifty tips and tricks for looking like you can do this stuff. With links to mathematical magic.

Unlucky

Dammit, I could use some tricks right now, Dave's Assignment 5 part A1 has is the most anal and annoying section ever. Xedi will know what I'm talking about.

Yeah I admit that section A was painfully long and boring to do, ending up with these nasty fractions (suppose three digit denominator isn't too bad but I just don't like it).

The trick is to never do section A... (or to make a computer do it)

Some of it actually gets marked :( And you can only get a computer to check it, not actually do it, just the answers looks pretty suspect. Though if I was a supervisor I'd be tempted to make my supervisees do it by computer, they'd learn a useful skill that way.

Cosmin, why would you stop at question A if the computer could do it ? As it surely could also do all the rest.

I imagine the answer written in ASM on the sheet :D
"Sorry, I couldn't understand what you wrote on your assignment sheet"

I don't know, what was question A in this case (we're talking about differential equations here, right?)? As I recall, they were usually just a bunch of random ODEs (while most of the B ones had at least some sort of context) which I either did with Mathematica/Maple or (usually) not at all since they weren't worth enough to justify the hassle (that said, neither did the rest of those sheets and in fact most assignment sheets in general :D). It's all about maximizing the results/annoyance ratio. :P

P.S. No need for ASM since Maple has a useful "export latex" feature (it's quite easy to tell it's written by a computer though).