Useless

[quasigeostrophy]

Back on the subject of my current math professor, apparently my office mate stayed after class last Friday to talk to him. When she asked him if he could give more concrete example problems in the lecture, this was his response:

The subject of PDEs is very theoretical, so there aren't too many examples. It's a lot of theory.

ORLY? Then where do problems like those in the homework originate? WTF?

Unfortunately, according to his bio on the math department faculty page, he's a full professor. Which means tenure. Which means the end-of-semester course evaluations may be a good way for me and my classmates to vent our frustration, but they won't do a damn bit of good.

Comments

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness! If there aren't many examples, you can just memorize them all, and then you're done. After all you're only interested in real-world applications.

Perhaps you could send him mail saying "I heard that there are only a few examples of PDEs. Since I only need to know about the application of PDEs, could you just send me the set of examples so I can learn them? Thanks!"

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

After all you're only interested in real-world applications.

Heh. That goes back to my questioning why I even took this class. The one PDE I really need (Navier-Stokes eqn. for fluid dynamics), he's not covering. The two methods used to solve it (perturbation, finite differences), he's not covering. Of course, it's way too late to drop now.

I'm seriously thinking about asking him the same thing my office mate did and if I get the same response, saying something along the lines of your suggestion. :-)