Crazy ranting complaining ahead... be warned....
(I just realized I start all my stories with the word so....hmmm oh well, don't care)
So I know I didn't get my Optimization homework done. I turn in incomplete homework for other courses all the time. I take my lowered grade and move on. Not this time. Stupid professor pulls me aside after class, brings out my homework and asks "I'd guess you're not happy with how this turned out, huh?" Well no shit... "No, but I worked on it for hours and couldn't get the second question into the 4th degree polynomial." "Well I have office hours today so why don't you come by and we'll get this fixed." What?! you mean I have to redo it? It's a beautiful day! I was going to go play some disc golf and then head to work at 3 pm! Noooooooo! "All right I'll stop in then."
Rage! So much Rage! Must swim out anger. Hour later: too tired to be angry... want to nap... want to eat...
I go to office hours, show him the work I've done so far and where I got stuck. He brings up Maple (If you do complicated math with any regularity Maple ought to be your new beast friend) and he starts plugging stuff in. Now I know Maple well enough, but umm wow, didn't know it could do that! That makes my life so much easier! So he gets to the gobbledygook 6th degree root crap I got stuck at and I mention this and he says "huh." Of course where I was stymied, he reaches into his nifty little bag of this is why I'm the professor tricks and gets an actual 6th degree polynomial that can't be factored.
Victory is mine! Professor 0 - Alex 1 I'm not just retarded! He doesn't know what to do with this either! Shit! What did he just do? He just got 6 sets of points, 2 complex that get thrown out and I'm left with 4 roots... like he originally said I would. Professor 1 - Alex 1. Yes I can go to the lab and redo the problem and turn it in tomorrow....
Problem 2: "What's this error you got here?" I ran HIS code like HE told me to and got a weird error output. Not my fault, not gonna change the code, just gonna turn it in as is. "Well that's what I got when I ran it with (0,0) as my starting point." "Here in the lab? let's try again and see what's going on." Oh please let it spit out the error again. Don't make me look like a fool... BAM there it is. Exact same result! Vindicated again! A few minutes of narration and code testing later he turns to me and says "Congratulations you just disovered a flaw in my code!" Woohoo! So that can be left as is. Professor 1 - Alex 2
Problem 3: "Umm these are KKT conditions, and the question asks about Lagrange conditions..." Um, I know, but I skipped the day you covered Lagrange so I had to consult that massive textbook we don't even use and these are the only relevant conditions I could find. Professor 2 - Alex 2 "Oops." "Ok well lets start at the beginning... What is the objective function?" "x^2 + y^2 = r^2? no that's the constraint, so just x?" long pause "Right...and..." and what? it's just x. isn't it? we're minimizing x. So 10 minutes of me feeling small and stupid later, I'm now on my way to the lab to fix 2 problems. Professor 3 - Alex 2 Dang it.
So much for disc golf, so much for going into work. Now I'm just cranky and pissed.
