DIFFERENTIALS & CODING

I apologize for not posting last week. The last couple weeks have been crazy and hectic, and I’ve been entertaining guests, which makes it difficult to find time for my studies.

That said, my coursework progression has slowed considerably over the last two weeks. I’m on the last section (chapter? lesson?) of differential calculus on Khan Academy and yesterday I finished Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) from the University of Michigan on Coursera.

Math

Calculus is becoming more challenging, but it’s also more apparent how useful it is.

Differentials can easily be used to calculate the velocity and acceleration of something in a function. For a while, I had difficulty analyzing the graphs of differentials because I kept looking at the direction of the curve, rather than when it was positive, negative, or zero. I understand them much more now and, apart from extremely complex functions, I actually enjoy doing them.

You may also use differentials to accurately hand draw graphs of functions when you don’t have a graphing calculator. The derivatives tell you minimum and maximum points (the top/bottom of curves), inflection points (when curve changes from concave up to concave down), critical points, and zeroes.

It may require a lot of calculations (it is called calculus, after all) before you can arrive at that point, but it’s pretty neat what you can do even with a complex function.

For the last lesson, we’re studying many of the ways differential calculus can be used in everyday applications. So far, I’ve only calculated distance, motion, velocity, and acceleration, but this lesson is quite lengthy and I anticipate learning many useful applications. To those who say Sal Khan doesn’t teach real life uses of mathematics, wait until you arrive at this lesson!

All of the work we have done in this calculus class has culminated in this section.

Programming

As I mentioned above, I finished my first programming class. The lectures each week are incredibly short, but I’m surprised by how much I’ve actually learned so far. We touched on writing functions (not to be confused with math functions above), which I have been wanting to learn. It’s when you define a variable to run a portion of code, so you don’t have to reenter it every time you need it to run.

The instructor said we won’t return to functions until chapter 10 or 11, and we ended the class on chapter 5. It looks like I’ll need to take a couple more classes in the specialization before I return to machine learning, and I’m okay with that. Learning a foundation in coding is incredibly important and useful. I’m enjoying it!

Not to mention, Charles Severance, the instructor for the course is great. He compared the University of Michigan to Hogwarts, from Harry Potter, because their dining hall looks like the great hall from the movies. He said that students sort themselves into houses, which is amazing. He is Slytherin because his last name is Severance (similar to Severus Snape) and he teaches Python (the emblematic animal for Slytherin is a snake). He even dressed up as Professor Snape in one of his lectures!

Anyway, besides the fact that I now want to move to Michigan and attend this university, we have done actual coding work too.

I have been writing a lot of basic programs for exercises and assignments. We have learned to write if/else statements, loops, while statements, Boolean statements, try/except, among others. I obviously can’t write anything too terribly complex and I did have some trouble writing the final program for the class, but I have a great foundation that I look forward to building upon in future courses.

I created a simple program that asks for a numeric input from a user and returns a custom error message if they enter anything besides a number. I learned how to loop back to continue asking for user inputs until the loop is broken. We studied how to take a count, total, and average or numbers in a list or entered by a user. The latter is important because I needed to know how to do that for one of my machine learning assignments and I couldn’t figure it out at the time.

I know to an experienced programmer, or anyone with the smallest amount of coding knowledge, this is all common sense. However, I had never learned this before and I’m stoked that I can create even these useless programs because it means I’ve started my programming journey.

I couldn’t post as much as I wanted, but I did include a couple screenshots of some of the programs I’ve written for the class thus far.

Conclusion

Despite all the craziness in my life right now, I feel that I’ve learned a lot over the past two weeks. Perhaps it hasn’t been as significant as past weeks, but I’m still progressing though my studies well.

Thank you for reading. I’m sorry again for missing last week. Hopefully, I’ll be back on track from here on out, but unfortunately I can’t guarantee that. There are no guarantees in life!

I hope you are all happy and well. I’ll see you next week!