LIMITS

I’ve been debating all week about whether or not I should begin the second class in my Machine Learning Specialization from The University of Washington on Coursera. I may be moving this month, and I’m not sure how long it will be before I have my computer and internet set up.

I had thought about waiting until I was settled before beginning a new class, but yesterday I decided to damn the torpedoes and start it. I’m not sure when I’m moving, but I can’t stand feeling lazy when there’s so much to do.

I still have all of my math classes, but generally I can’t do more than 3 or 4 hours of math study in a day before I’m burnt out and irritated. That’s why I usually limit it to 2 hours per day.

I will say, it feels great to finally be in calculus. Although it’s taught in public high schools, only 15% of high schoolers take calculus. I’m not sure, but I think that number was lower when I was in high school, way back when. It just wasn’t part of the standard curriculum, which is what I was all about at that time in my life. I was admittedly a tad lazy in high school and rarely went above and beyond in my studies. It wasn’t until college that I became gung ho about academics and took as many classes as possible.

To my credit, however, I did prefer academic courses for my electives in high school. While most people took ceramics, wood shop, band, sports, etc., I took mythology. I still love mythology. Even in university, I took a bunch of psychology classes just for fun. I think I only needed two or three more classes to get my minor in psychology. I didn’t decide to take an activity class until my final year in university. I took fencing and it was awesome. It made me wish I had taken more actual elective and activity classes before that.

All of that to explain why I didn’t take calculus in high school. I realize, as mentioned last week, that the United States is painfully behind many other nations in academics. I wish it was different. That’s not the fault of the teachers. It’s just that schools aren’t funded and focused on the way they should be by officials.

I’m still not sure about that whole common core thing. All I know is some of the stories and math problems I have read online and in articles, which don’t make sense at all. It seems to be a counter-intuitive program if what I’ve seen is accurate. I have several friends and family members who are teachers, but I haven’t asked them their opinions. I’m sure everyone they know has asked the same questions and they’re probably sick of talking about it.

So, calculus. . .

I began differential calculus this week. Differential and integral calculus are often taught together as calculus I, but they’re split up on Khan Academy. It’s the same material; it’s merely organized separately. I’m not sure how long it will take to complete the classes. I suppose it depends on the content difficulty and the number of lessons.

So far, we have only focused on limits. Limits are a pretty basic concept. It’s where a function approaches a limit. Don’t you love when people use the word they’re defining in the definition of the word? That’s one of my pet peeves in dictionaries. For example, on Dictionary.com the definition for condescension is: an act or instance of condescending, or behavior that is patronizing or condescending. Wikipedia had condescending as an example of a circular definition from Merriam-Webster, but it’s been updated on their dictionary since that was written. Dictionary.com hasn’t updated theirs.

I keep going off on tangents today! A limit is the value that a function or sequence approaches as the input or index approaches some value. What’s the value of the function as your input becomes closer and closer to a certain value? It’s kind of hard to explain without doing the math or demonstrating on a graph, which isn’t the simplest thing to do in a journal. Just trust that it’s a simple concept. It’s not always the easiest to determine the limit, as it often involves algebra, rationalization, and factoring, but the concept of a limit is pretty basic. How many times can I say concept or limit in this journal? Limit concept!

That’s all I’ve really done thus far in calculus. Limits are the basis for many concepts (!) in calculus, including derivatives. It just so happens that I need to be familiar with derivatives for the remaining courses in my machine learning specialization, so it works out very well that I’ll be studying them soon.

Speaking of machine learning, I finally passed the quiz from last week and got 100% in my first course, which I was more than determined to accomplish. I began my regression class yesterday. We have only gone over what we’ll be learning in the class, but I’m pretty excited, and maybe a little worried. For the first half of the class, we’ll continue to use predefined algorithms in GraphLab Create like we did in the introductory course. In the second half, we’ll be writing algorithms in Python from scratch.

This is exactly what I need and want to learn, but it’s a little terrifying since I’ve never done anything like this. The professors are fantastic and the classes are well designed, so I’m confident that I won’t be thrown to the wolves to figure it out on my own. I dream of being able to write my own code and algorithms. It’s such a foreign concept but something I want to be able to do professionally more than anything.

As always, I’ll keep you updated as I progress through the class.

Thank you for your support! I’m sorry for all of my side thoughts this week. My brain is clearly scattered right now! I hope you got some enjoyment out of reading this, either way.