maths.txt

14:01 <mawk> I solved a cubic equation at work
14:01 <mawk> never thought that would be useful
14:01 <jpa-> manually?
14:01 <mawk> yes
14:01 <jpa-> meh :)
14:02 <mawk> to derive the analytical expression
14:02 <jpa-> i'd only bother up to quadratic manually, symbolic calculation for everything more than that
14:02 <jpa-> maxima and similar work well
14:02 <PaulFertser> You have no math ambitions jpa- ;)
14:02 <mawk> I use sage for symbolic stuff because I'm poor
14:02 <mawk> but it's often not helpful
14:02 <jpa-> maxima is free :P
14:03 <mawk> I should try
14:03 <jpa-> ah, sagemath uses maxima
14:03 <jpa-> PaulFertser: that is probably true, but i'll try to claim that i focus my math ambitions on higher understanding rather than routine work!
14:04 <jpa-> .. that is, changing places of + and - signs until stuff works correctly


14:19:27     englishman | this is engineering, marketing sells 3.1415 but only has the budget for pi=3
14:19:47           jpa- | and the computation actually needs tau


19:44 <qyx> matlab pros, inverse of polyval?
19:44 <qyx> I want to find x
19:44 <Steffanx-> Laurenceb make yourself useful 
< lolrence did not make himself useful>
22:34 <mawk> qyx: find the root of p-a if you want the x such that p(x) = a
22:34 <mawk> in methlab
22:35 <qyx> I eyeballed the curve and applied an educated guess, then hardcoded the values
22:35 <qyx> It worked flawlessly