My AI project was postponed until March

Mott the Hoople said:
Yea huh....wait till you take organic chemistry. Not much math in it.....still a ball buster.
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Yeah, it's less fun than the industrial related things. Still better than math.

The thing is, I love doing math when it's an actual application. But class math is an abstraction, and I don't deal with abstractions well, which makes it much harder for me.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
I loved organic chemistry especially the lab work. Even now I occasionally start thinking about electrophilic and nucleophilic substitution for no reason.
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Yea, I do that with Grignard reactions. I know what you mean. I thought Organic chemistry was fun too. I loved synthesizing products from a formula, but still and all....it was a ball buster of a class. I remember my Organic Chem class started out with 28 students and by the end of the year only 6 of us were left.
 
Kel-Tec Sub 2000 said:
Yeah, it's less fun than the industrial related things. Still better than math.

The thing is, I love doing math when it's an actual application. But class math is an abstraction, and I don't deal with abstractions well, which makes it much harder for me.
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Yea I have the same issue. I do well with math when it has real world applications but solving math puzzles to be solving math puzzles doesn't interest me much. I'm far better than the average person at math but also far from being talented at it.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Yea I have the same issue. I do well with math when it has real world applications but solving math puzzles to be solving math puzzles doesn't interest me much. I'm far better than the average person at math but also far from being talented at it.
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I still find it weird how Americans say math rather than maths. Forgive me for trying to introduce some logic here but isn't the full word mathematics not mathematic, hence the abbreviation should be maths, n'est-ce pas?
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
I still find it weird how Americans say math rather than maths. Forgive me for trying to introduce some logic here but isn't the full word mathematics not mathematic, hence the abbreviation should be maths, n'est-ce pas?
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Yes its mathematics but most math is arithmetic not arithmetics.

Checkmate England.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Kinda splitting hairs aren't you?
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Probably but it just irritates the hell out of me. I had a discussion, for want of a better word, with Damn Yankee about this and rather than just say well I know it's wrong but so what. He went into a convoluted explanation as to how it was perfectly correct. Anyway rant over.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Yea, I do that with Grignard reactions. I know what you mean. I thought Organic chemistry was fun too. I loved synthesizing products from a formula, but still and all....it was a ball buster of a class. I remember my Organic Chem class started out with 28 students and by the end of the year only 6 of us were left.
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We had to do a one week organic chemistry practical in between the second and third year. I remember being really pissed off as it was my 21st birthday and all the bars were shut down. Anyway we were given the task of synthesising ferrocene, a chemical oddity which had no practical use at that time. The sandwich structure of ferrocene was first predicted from its IR and NMR spectographs and then finally confirmed by X-ray crystallography in 1954.

The task was to make it and then measure its paramagnetism. It was a difficult beggar to make as the reaction conditions had to be very precisely monitored. It took me three goes to get it right. As I say it was considered a chemical curiosity yet only recently I read an article where it is being used for new generation solar panels!!

80px-Ferrocene-2D.png
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
So if you abbreviate arithmetic then it's legitimate to use arith, not ariths. However it is not grammatically correct to use math for mathematics.
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Who made you dictator of the English language? It's just a dialectical difference, that's all. If you are looking for inconsistencies, I promise you, there are far worse ones where the English language is concerned.

Anyway, to examine this further, wouldn't it really depend on the function of s in the word? If it were s, as in the free morpheme that can be attached to words to indicate plurality, then sure, you would usually add s in the abbreviation when that abbreviation also refers to something plural. You cannot, after all, eliminate it without also taking away the explicit plurality. If, on the other hand, the last consonant in the word just happens to end with an s, and it otherwise conveys no special meaning itself, why would you? Seems like you're just hypercorrecting.

So what is the function of the s in mathematics? Well, as your example succintly points out, it appears to be merely the end of the word, as you can't study a mathematic. So, no, you'd no more abbreviate it to "maths" than you'd abbreviate abbreviation to abbrevn - that's not how it works. The s is at best the nonfunctional remnant of s, the free morpheme. Americans would've discarded it because we got so used to thinking abouts mathematics in the singular, which really works just about as well as the plural for subjects (why not call history "the histories?") The British would've held onto the old pronunciation because that's just what they decided to do and there's no reason to make a fuss about it.

Well, that's my two theories anyway - the British are hypercorrecting or Americans came up with a different usage that makes just as much sense anyway.
 
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