FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for March 16, 2012

Good thing I didn’t take trig in high school.

I barely understood Algebra and Geometry

Maybe he’ll have pi for dessert.

Some decades ago I broke 700 in the math SAT. If I took it again today I’d be lucky to get the 200 points for writing my name correctly. Never used a sine or cosine during my working life, I’m pleased to say.

I agree. Anything involving mathematics should be done after a meal. I’ve done my best mathematics with bags of M&M’s involved.

I used to use calculus to figure out the volume of the coffee cups in the various coffee vending machines at work!Trig and geometry are my real specialty.

I never thought I’d use my hs trig, but lo and behold in college we did set design, in the days before computer programs. Trig came in VERY handy! Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten it all.

Pi is wrong. It should be Tau.

I aced algebra, and trig, calculus was easy at the beginning and got harder, differential equations I had to take twice, flunked it the first time. I found that I only understood higher math if I had a practical use for it, such as Bessel functions describing frequency modulation. Thank goodness for computers that can do numerical integration and FFT plots.

Would have been even better two days ago (3.14)

Pepperoni + mushroom= yum

Yeah, I had great math skills too, and forgot all of it. In my defense, it has been 30 years since high school and I never ever used any of the higher math I learned (trig, algebra, calculus, differential equations) after I got out of college. But there are lots of days that it bugs me that I lost so much of that.

The sooner that Peter gets that test done, the better he’ll feel, and the sooner he can get to lunch.

This should have been for “Pi Day,” 3.14.

Some day they will find out that the computers are the cause of cancer or some such thing. They will ban the use of them and everybody will have to learn to use those math skills.

For some reason, I loved algebra and trig, but I despised calculus and physics. Physics caused me to change my college major from ocean engineering to business computers and allowed me to take 8 years to accomplish a 4 year degree. And college was STILL a waste of time, because my current job of tech software support for the last 18 years was gotten because of skills learned at my first job at McDonald’s and NOT my college degree at all.

@TimeTravelerPepperoni is wrong. It should be cheese

that looks easy as pie