I've still got it!

I did calculus today, for the first time in a couple years.  It was just easy stuff, of course.  I'm going through my favorite calculus book in order, page by page, and doing every problem in the whole thing, because that is what needs to happen in order for me to truly make up for lost time.  I'm a firm believer in the fact that nobody anywhere in the sciences or engineering can afford to be weak in any concept in calculus.  It is the language of physics, and physics is the backbone of engineering.

I have always loved calculus.  Of course, it helps that I had a truly amazing professor to help me along as I was first learning it.  I found, as I learned calculus, the world looked different to me.  It was just like when I learned any of my favorite topics in physics, like classical mechanics or optics, or even my least favorite topic of all, circuits.  The world looks brighter when you see it through the eyes of higher order mathematics, like there's this whole undercurrent that most people don't see, but you do, the duct tape and strings that hold the whole works together. I hadn't realized just how much I had ceased to see the world that way in the time I spent away from it, but today, after doing this work, I feel like my eyes are open again.

Something as simple as driving a car is mighty fun to think about when you can envision the functions for velocity, acceleration, and more.  Watching a pot boil is not boring when you picture the thermodynamic equation going on where it sits on the burner.  The world is an amazing place when you are able to see it by the numbers, and calculus really is the ticket. 

Anyway, having not done calculus in a couple years, and not significant amounts of it even then, it was with great trepidation that I opened my favorite text this morning.  I went to my favorite professor's website, watched a bunch of the animations, read through his lecture notes, and it all came back as if I'd never left.  I breezed through 60 problems, getting only one of them wrong, and that one, only by a stupid mistake that I knew better than to make anyway.  Obviously, I don't expect that instantaneous success with higher order stuff, as the stuff I did today was all single variable, but I'll take today's success for what it's worth.

I'm happy and grateful to be able to report that after several years' hiatus, I can still do calculus!