| January 2008 | ||||||
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
| Dec Feb | ||||||
Wednesday, January 23, 2008Nuts and Bolts
There were about 20 college seniors in the classroom. The fun part of my presentation was over: the slides that made them laugh, the slides that had cool pictures of the work we do. Now I had to open the hood and show them the nuts and bolts.
This is a visually oriented generation, their professor told me later. You need to keep it short and simple. But what I had to say now wasn't graphic. It wasn't sexy. It had to do more with nuts and bolts.
So before I moved on, I told them a story...
The other night, I sat down at the table with my son. We have been working on math nightly, and it was time. He had already done the assigned problems, and it was getting a little late, so I sat down with him and got him started on a derivation.
I gave him three collinear points arranged vertically in the X-Y plane: a "center" and two "foci" equally distant from it. He agreed that those points defined a hyperbola with parameters "a", "b" and "c". So we let (x,y) be the coordinates of an arbitrary point on the hyperbola.
Then I asked him to derive the x-y equation of the hyperbola.
He had watched me do the same thing for a parabola a few weeks before. And we did the same thing for an ellipse not too long after that. So it wasn't an outrageous thing to ask. And anyway, I got him started on the first page or so of algebra before I handed the pencil to him.
It took him a while, but eventually he began to nod his head in recognition as the equation unfolded before him.
Sometimes it's not enough to just know the equation. Sometimes you need to know where it comes from. Or at least, you need to understand that once upon a time you did the dirty work and could do it again if you had to. Math isn't just about results. It's about the nuts and bolts, too.
... and my story was done.
The college kids shifted a little in their seats. Some of them stole glances at each other. I flipped to the next slide in my presentation.
On the screen was a list of some of the gory details of my work: input files, default data, log files, preprocessing, code generation, jobs and models, simulation executives, real-time synchronization, compilation, linking, debugging... These, I said, are the kind of nuts and bolts that (like it or not) you'll need to master if you want to be top notch simulation engineers.
I wonder if they got the message or if they just think that guy's a slave driver.
11:20:28 PM permalink: [
]
feedback: 
comments: []
