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Posted on 07/22/2005 12:02:04 PM PDT by GreenLanternCorps
On her Web site, Danica McKellar, the actress best known as Winnie Cooper on the television series "The Wonder Years," takes on questions that require more than a moment's thought to answer.
"If it takes Sam six minutes to wash a car by himself," one fan asked recently, "and it takes Brian eight minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together?"
"This is a 'rates' problem," Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. "The key is to think about each of their 'car washing rates' and not the 'time' it takes them."
Ms. McKellar, now a semiregular on "The West Wing" playing a White House speechwriter, Elsie Snuffin, is probably the only person on prime-time television who moonlights as a cyberspace math tutor.
Her mathematics knowledge extends well beyond calculus. As a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, she also took more esoteric classes, the ones with names like "complex analysis" and "real analysis," and she pondered making a career move to professional mathematician.
"I love that stuff," Ms. McKellar said last month during a visit to Manhattan after a play-reading in the Hamptons. Her conversation was peppered with terminology like "epsilons" and "limsups" (pronounced "lim soups").
"I love continuous functions and proving if functions are continuous or not," she said.
She may also be the only actress, now or ever, to prove a new mathematical theorem, one that bears her name. Certainly, she is the only theorem prover who appears wearing black lingerie in the July issue of Stuff magazine. Even in that interview, she mentioned math.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You have to work problems. Start with the beginning problems even though they will be so simple you can work them in your head. Write down the solution step by step and get a method going as if teacher said 'show your work'. Some books start with a chapter on applications and laws, which may be skipped so as to get to the practice problems. Don't worry about associative and distributive and two trains problems in the beginning, but do work the cut and dried arithmetic problems. When you can factor quadratics like a pro, you are getting there.
So 5 divided by 4 equals 1.3?
Probably be a more complicated project than the McKeller Theorem, that one. ;-)
Taken her back to my room and put a BIG Epsilon in her Delta!
My wife, who didn't go past college algebra, recently bought a 1,200 page calculus textbook so she can work through it in her spare time, just for the sake of learning.
I love that woman!
A lot of that was Greek to me, so I know for a fact I should DEFINITELY start over with simple arithmetic! LOL You know the weird thing is...I never did well when I had to "show my work". I would skip a step or two, and when I did, I would somehow arrive at the correct answer. When I had to show each step, I was sure to screw it up. Overthinking, I suppose. :)
LOL! Well, she went a heckuva a lot further than I did. Good on her for tackling the calculus. I'm quite a ways removed from attempting THAT! :)
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I went for the "close enough for government work" answer on that one. It is obvious that the one will do half the car in three minutes while the other will take four minutes to do half the car, assuming the faster one continues working after he does his half they should complete the job in about three and a half minutes, this was an almost instantaneous computation. I am a high school graduate but I have seen college graduates who could not set up the formula and come up with the precise answer.
If the textbook has margins, you are expected to make notes and diagrams right in there. It isn't a schoolbook but your property, and it will be referred to over and over in the future.
I might have to check that book out :)
Daaayyyyaaamica Danica!!!!
You will be developing methods. At first it will be really simple stuff, but later when you get to methods of integration it will be very important to note exactly what steps you do when you solve a problem. Some methods are two-step and if you can just bang those out you will be at the level expected of grad students. That's why grad students don't solve problems so much as prove theorems; they are expected to know how to solve problems already.
Yes, but then Winnie went away and Kevin married another woman. I have never forgiven ABC for the "Winnie Cooper Incident".
I have not a clue what kind of job she will get with that type of degree but I figure if she loves doing something most people either hate or can't do, she will be paid well to do it.
China graduates more engineers in a month than America does in a year. Don't do anything to discourage someone who wants to major in math, science, or engineering.
Discourage her? Oh my no! In fact, we give her free rein in her high school schedule. She and her counselor cooked up some odd combination that allows her to take every advanced math course at the school. It involves skipping science and English for a year and doubling up in her Senior year. I am just here to sign off, and encourage.
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Then later, when she has her grad degree, she can start reading philosophy to figure out what she just did. :)
And that is the right answer, because it is delivered in two seconds, and it is pretty darn close."
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