Madonna's Bra

I was studying chapter A2 of MST221 this weekend, working away in the office I use when I work from home. As is usual the dogs were in there with me to give me a hand with the algebra sleep on the sofa but at one point Mrs Dracunculus came in with a cup of tea and asked what I was up to.

Being all enthusiastic about my new knowledge of parabolas and hyperbolas I started to scribble some cones on my whiteboard and show what happens when you cut them up.



"Oh," said Mrs Dracunculus, " so how come you have to use Madonnas' bra in mathematics?"



She's not very mathematical, Mrs Dracunculus.

0,1,1,2,3,5,8...

Just finished Chapter A1 of MST221 in which we get to poke around that set of numbers up there, the Fibonacci sequence, an example of a second order recurrence system. All quite interesting stuff and I didn't have too many problems getting my head around the sums including the derivation of a closed form for such sequences - which given the struggle I had with wrapping my poor dragony brain around the same derivation for first order sequences last year I was rather happy with.

I did have a bit of an issue with the algebra when doing the exercise to derive a closed form for a Cassini identity as the OU have started truncating their solutions and I am assuming just expect you to be able to follow this stuff by now.... bit like this...



Anyway a quick email to the tutor (and a same day response - great service!) gave me a poke in the right direction with something that is bleeding obvious once you've been shown it, which is.

 n-1                          n       n+1
a     is a common factor of  a   and a

so 2 is a common factor of 4 and 8, 3 is a common factor of 9 and 27, and so on.

I was even happier when Question 2 of the TMA was on just such an identity.

So, onto conics

Here we go again

Woot! Large brown cardboard box arrived yesterday which means it can only be Open University time again.

Sure enough the first half of MST221 has arrived along with the usual assortment of DVDs and funny coloured bits of paper. I now have three copies of the "Enrichment Material" thanks to previously doing MU120 and MST121 but oddly enough the didn't send another copy of Mathcad and presumably assume you did MST121 and have the box handy somewhere (I did, but spent ten minutes rummaging through funny coloured bits of paper to find the sodding password).

On the subject of Mathcad... has ever a more crappy piece of software ever been designed? I mean it's hideous ugly, buggy as hell (touch the scroll wheel of your mouse at your peril) and I think I could do the maths faster sometimes its that slow. I really do not like using it at all and I really wist the OU could sort out a deal with Wolfram so we could use Mathematica - you know software people in the real world use?

Rather amusingly I notice that my tutor is the same one I had when I was doing MU120, less amusingly one of my tutorials is in Ipswitch which is quite a flapping distance from the lair.

Anyway time to dust of MST121 for a bit of revision on sequences and then I'll get an early start on unit A - I find keeping two or three weeks ahead of the study timetable works best for me and allows for a bit of wiggle room should things get tricky away from sums.