Why you should hug a math major today (and maybe even scientists and engineers)

I've been working on Slader, a website where you answer math questions and get paid a bit per solution. There's more comprehensive information in a review here, if you're interested.

Anyway, it occurred to me that the math majors/grad students I know are absolutely, totally nuts.

Look, I like LaTeX. It makes things pretty, especially equations. I've had to use quite a bit of it to write papers which, though scientifically moribund, were at least formatted (roughly) according to ApJ standards.

But you math people are totally ridiculous.

I remember one of my suitemates (let's call him "Jeff", because that's actually his name) had to write homework solutions in LaTeX. This was for an upper-division math class taught by a very assertive (though quite nice) Chinese professor. (Direct quote from the professor in my multivariable math class explaining derivatives: "e^x is like a strong child; you hit it and it stays the same. ln x is like a weak child; it dies and gets buried underground.)

So I'm sure he, and the other math majors I know, had to do LaTeX all the time.

Anyway, I just solved a part of a calculus problem. It involves determining where a function is concave up. It's part 1 of five. After completing it, I realized that it was totally not worth 75 cents.

Here's what the solution looks like:

Now wait a minute, you might say. That looks not bad. Well, it's actually quite bad, as in I did a crappy job. It's sparse on the explanations. I should add in subsections indicating that you need to test for the cases when x>0 and x<0. But I got tired. And here's why. Here's the LaTeX source code that I used to actually write the solution.

Now this isn't bad if you're a computer scientist, or a mathematician, or an engineer. But I taught high school for the last year. I have no fucking clue how people handle coding all day. Maybe it's like French; I don't know how the hell it works, but I guess if you do it long enough, it makes sense to you, even if it makes you seem mechanical (programming) or pretentious (French).

Anyway, I have a whole new sympathy for math people who do this every goddamn day, for many hours of said goddamn day. So go hug one. Maybe it will help with the carpal tunnel and eyestrain.