A little background for those who don't know: PDE (Differential Equations 2 or Partial Differential Equations) is one of my many math classes this semester. To take PDE you must first take Calculus 1, Calculus 2, Differential Equations, and have at least a passing knowledge of bacis Algebra. The point here is not to say, "Look at me I'm smart," but to say, "Look at me I like math."

So anyway, the other day I was sitting in PDE while we were doing some farely interesting PDEs. I realized something that I had realized at the end of my first semester of DE. There was just something that didn't strike me as so interesting. I couldn't precisely pinpoint it, but I decided to blame it on too much Algebra. In DE or PDE you end up with really long equations that need a page or more just for simplification, so it must have been too much Algebra...

But wait!! I love algebra, don't I? Maybe I was a late bloomer, but highschool Algebra was when I realized (to my social horror) that I loved math. Now I'll tell anyone that I love math, but at that point it seemed to me that it was something that you weren't supposed to tell anyone, cuz it was cool to hate math. But anyway, algebra was when I discovered my calling; when I discovered that math was my thing. So then why in the world should that be my reason for not enjoying DE as much as possible? As you can see this greatly confused me: knowing algebra was my first math love and at the same time blaming it for the foul taste I found in DE.

After much deliberation, my mind told myself this little story as an attempt to explain itself to itself, so I'll translate it to english as best as possible (my mind speaks think, not English...that's why writing classes are difficult for me and math is so easy):

A couple years ago I decided I wanted to download the Bible in MP3 format. I searched for a long time and finally found one for free at http://www.audiotreasure.com. Now I could have right clicked on each individual chapter of the bible and clicked "save as" and so on. But instead I found a list of books of the bible, and wrote a program to make a list of the links I wanted to download. Then I gave that list to a program called get right and it downloaded them while I did something else. Now I had the books of the bible on my computer. I really didn't like the way they were organized or the lack thereof. I wanted each book to have it's own directory. Again I could have right-clicked in the proper window and selected "New Folder" and then renamed it to "01_Genesis" and continued inductively for the next 65 books. But I could also shoot myself, and I didn't want to do either. So I wrote a program that created the directories and stuck the files in them. I then wanted playlists for each separate book of the Bible, and again I wrote a program.

So what's the moral? Maybe it's obvious, but the moral is I can't stand doing such tedious monotonous work. The moral is, "I'm not a computer." It's the computer to do mindless boring calculations. After realizing some of the amazing power of computers (I didn't start programming till late in highschool), my mind started to become more and more resistant to doing such monotonous work. So when I was in the end of my first semester of DE, my mind was trying to tell myself, "Hey bub, we only do this kinda stuff to a certain extent and you're about to cross the line. You better watch it, or I'm gonna go postal!" So the verdict is that my mind has decided that all this algebra is the work of a computer, not of itself.

So have I given up on DE or PDE, heck no. Thankfully I've found that I can connect to a computer at school from my house and run either maple or mathematica and happily delegate that kind of work to a mindless computational beast. Thank you Mathematica for saving me from hating DE.