My dear Calculus!




I knew that my knowledge of statistics, math and machine learning would improve after joining this course. But I never thought that I had to work equally hard on my vocabulary. The course has introduced me to words, some of which I find difficult to spell, pronounce and understand.

Stochastic, Lambda, Vector, Kurtosis. And I believe by the time I say Heteroscedasticity correctly, I will miss my bus #878 for the university and the next one comes after half an hour. Auckland public transport is not very good.

Besides myself, I feel sorry for Hypothesis. He has a split personality, Null and Alternative, which I thought is cool. But then I saw the way everyone was after rejecting the Null.

Derivative comes to scare me and succeeds somewhat. It simply means ‘slope’ but look at the swag – D E R I V A T I V E. And why do we call normal distribution Gaussian? It is a sure way to put me off center.

It doesn’t help that Matt’s (our professor) favourite film is Matrix! He dedicated one whole lecture to the topic which made many of us look small (‘not significant’ in statistics). And then he said it was okay if we did not get it!

Then there are P-values, T-values, F-statistic and Z scores. There are more alphabets out there. So go for it.

Whhhhyyyy? I mean why do we have to make life so ‘problematic’?

So here is what I think. I believe men and women were just born to copulate. Men were supposed to hunt and protect the family and women were supposed to cook and take care of children and elders. Once in a while they were supposed to change roles to get 360 degree flavours of life but that was it. Why did we complicate life by bringing in calculus and matrices? While I have set out to pivot my life doing this course, in all of 45 years I don’t know anyone who makes a living using calculus or trigonometry. Except Matt maybe.

P.S: And for those of you who thought Pandas are cute, go ask someone who is struggling to write Python codes.  

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