Quotes from Spring 1994

Instructor quotes

• We haven't had a definition for over 2 minutes. 8-31-94
• I'm probably beating this to death friends, but that's my nature---all those insecurities. 8-31-94
• You may have an astigmatism so that this doesn't look like a square, but it is. 8-31-94
• I don't want to wander off into that set theoretic swamp because I'm old and may get sucked down in it. 8-31-94
• This probably isn't good mathematical writing... You can leave out the probably. 9-2-94
• Remember what rho is? "No," they cried. "Tell us." So he did. Rho is... 9-2-94
• There are two things to prove and that always makes it twice as much work. 9-2-94
• Most people will be intimidated by a forceful use of the word "certainly." 9-2-94
• I shouldn't have kept that secret from you friends, but the older mind works in strange ways. 9-9-94
• Next I do the following insanely clever thing. 9-12-94
• "How do you do that," they cried. "Tell us about it." And he did. 9-12-94
• We invoke part a)... "Come out." 9-12-94
• What does theorem seven say? I'll bet I could prove it if I could read it. 9-12-94
• ... "el trivially," as we say in Spanish. 9-16-94
• Well so what, sports fans? 9-16-94
• It doesn't hurt to let you in on what we are trying to do. 9-16-94
• If you had a week maybe you could add an infinite number of things together, but you couldn't do it in 50 minutes... maybe you couldn't do it in a week, we'll have to think about that. 9-16-94
• [Simplifying an equation] It's a lot like a Greek tragedy where all but one of the players is killed off. 9-19-94
• Let's see if I can put this theorem in a romantic way. 9-19-94
• How do we do that? Well, probably wrong, but we can look in the book. 9-19-94
• I'm sure you've all got the idea. It's just a matter of getting me tuned in on your station. 9-19-94
• I think that to behave responsibly we should talk about continuity. 9-21-94
• I don't know much about logic. I guess I'm relatively illogical. 9-21-94
• I don't know what I was thinking about there...I guess nothing. 9-23-94
• Well I beat that to death and not in the most efficient way either. 9-23-94
• We older folk, we tend to forget things...but I'll never forget that today is Thursday...No Saturday...No what is today? [Monday] 9-26-94
• "El trivial," as we say in Spanish. It's wonderful to be multilingual. 9-26-94
• Remember future teachers, never do this... 9-26-94
• I haven't been looking at the police reports lately, but I trust that none of you are [sic] in them. 9-26-94
• I wasn't a very good soldier. I can testify to that. It wasn't the best time I've had even though they told me it should be. Those were the good old days. 9-28-94
• It's like love & marriage. You can't have one without the other.[sung] 9-28-94
• You did a lot of stuff before you got banished from the mathematical community and we got together. 9-28-94
• Enough of that ... well, more than enough of that. 9-28-94
• When I put in details I don't mean to be condescending. I'm just a prisoner of my experiences. I need details. 9-28-94
• With all those hypotheses there must be something pretty neat that's true. 9-30-94
• The secret way to write this, to mystify your friends, is... 9-30-94
• You're not supposed to remember anything more than a couple hours. At least that's what I was told. 9-30-94
• It gets so complicated thinking about this, maybe if we just lie down awhile it will go away. 9-30-94
• Now I am going to do something that takes incredible incite. [deleted to protect the innocent.] That's just astounding, how do I do it day after day? 9-30-94
• The name of the man whose name is Henry, is Henry. 9-30-94
• Someone less secure would [write an equation a different way] but this is a tribute to the high degree of organization going on here. 10-3-94
• You put these [hypotheses] all together, they spell "ma_ha_ha_ther" [sung] 10-3-94
• For my next number, I'd like to do this thing about connectivity. 10-3-94
• I tend to forget...forget what? 10-3-94
• There are three things about getting old. One is you forget things. 10-3-94
• It was General Sherman who said, "War is L." 10-5-94
• I'm risking greatly here boring you to death. 10-5-94
• There is no need for me to do this because we've already done it, but I'm going to do it... Well, I think you'll like it. 10-7-94
• We are ready to administer the coup de gras. That's when you run over your opponent with a lawn mower. 10-7-94
• This is so fiendishly clever that there should be a law against it. 10-7-94
• None but the most indolent student will fail to verify these theorems. 10-7-94
• If you fall asleep, promise not to snore. You may disturb someone who is trying to read the Exponent. 10-7-94
• No textbook can resist the temptation to draw a picture. 10-10-94
• An interesting cultural note: As you all know "m" stands for "slope". How did it get associated with slope? Well, "slope" used to be called "mslope", but it was hard to pronounce. So using one of those laws from physics, the Law of Conservation of Letters, they changed "mslope" to "slope". However, the "m" stuck with us to this day. 10-12-94
• The point of this test is not to ask you questions that you can't answer, that would be easy to do. 10-12-94
• Those are worth looking at as well, but I don't think we'll do that. 10-19-94
• We can write that in secret code as... 10-19-94
• I think I've started a sentence I can't finish here. 10-19-94
• ...maybe this will bore you too, but I want to do it. 10-21-94
• Most real numbers are not less than themselves. Well at least that's the way it was when I left my office, but they've been working. You can hear them... 10-24-94
• Notice the clever choice of epsilon. It's a testimony to my magnificent preparation. 10-24-94
• Let me tell you about induction. If nothing else, I'll amuse myself. 10-26-94
• Peano wrote five postulates to describe the natural numbers. The five postulates could have been written as one postulate if you just put "and" in between each postulate. 10-26-94
• We won't get into that. Let the evil of the day be sufficient unto. 10-26-94
• To prove that takes some doing, and here is the doing... 10-26-94
• We have a step function. What do we call it? Sigma---for step. 10-28-94
• That's by theorem seven that has now gone by the way of the Dodo. 10-28-94
• I'm trying to reform here and finish on time. 10-28-94
• When last seen we were on Theorem 10. 10-30-94
• I hoped to get this all in here. I may have to write on the carpet here in a moment. 10-30-94
• I don't know how many of you have thought about this... surely you have... no, you have probably never have. 11-2-94
• What do I want to do with that. I'll tell you what to do with that fella. No, no, be nice. 11-2-94
• [Reads his notes to himself] Hey this sounds interesting. I wonder if it's right. 11-2-94
• Enough is enough... is enough by Stein's Theorem. 11-2-94
• This is just an exercise in counting in that transfinite way. 11-4-94
• It's universally abbreviated in the U.S. and a.e. 11-4-94
• "Where was we?" As we say in the army. 11-7-94
• Finally, we are about to run over the opponent with a power lawnmower. 11-11-94
• This is probably romantic mathematics. 11-14-94
• If you have the courage to multiply this out using the binomial theorem, you would get... 11-18-94
• Put those integrals together and they spell... happiness. 11-21-94
• Here is where you might be tempted to get off the train. 11-28-94
• Oh bummer, to use the technical term for that. 11-28-94
• You may think "If I lie down, it might go away," and it might. 11-30-94
• In case you don't know trigonometry, borrow a trig. book from some high school student. 11-30-94
• What's the next thing? I think it's the theorem. It's the theorem. Oh, good! 11-30-94
• I'll beat these things to death in my indelible style. 12-5-94
• There's probably no point to writing this, but here we go. 12-5-94
• I have asked the grader to look at that problem with the milk of kindness. 12-7-94
• I'm not going to test you on this, so don't get hyper. 12-7-94
• My conclusion is that the human is a simple machine capable of making only linear decisions. 8-23-94
• You learn this quickly or confusion will accumulate. 8-25-94
• The mathematician's world is different than ours. Sometimes we respect them but sometimes we don't. 9-1-94
• That's not quite true... but truly speaking, it is. 8-24-94
• I try to keep life simple, but I know too much. 8-26-94
• Fortunately, math works for us today. 8-29-94
• You've probably seen this formula if you stay up late at night reading the CRC manual. 8-29-94
• We are going to do this until the cows come home & they're lost. 8-31-94
• Thing is you're grad students now so studying over break is good. It gives you something to do, right? 9-2-94
• Can you tell I spent more time on my jokes than my lecture for today? 9-2-94
• I'm teaching an undergrad class this semester too. I like this one better. I had high hopes for them, but there's just something about them... Anyway, that 'dim' [light switch] setting reminded me of them. 9-2-94
• I'm not very happy, not because my toe is bruised, but because this is wrong. 9-7-94
• I've sort of walked myself into a technical box that I'm not quite pleased with. 9-9-94
• Call me binary man. 9-9-94
• Is the semester already crappy? 9-12-94
• Be happy, this is going to be a crappy week for me. 9-12-94
• I think that their are plenty of dopes on our faculty. 9-12-94
• I may be friendly, but I'm not stupid. 9-12-94
• The halting problem is one of the most significant fundamental ideas period... 9-14-94
• I've given you the algorithm and the input. You couldn't ask for anything more... well, maybe a cheeseburger. 9-16-94
• I have this desire to give a long rambling lecture about success and the philosophy of success, but I won't. 9-19-94
• If you're getting worked up about one point on a quiz, maybe you need to reevaluate your life priorities. 9-21-94
• I have a personal prejudice against people who hold their sneezes back. 9-21-94
• We generally don't choose to study crappy algorithms. 9-30-94
• Whoever thought up the heapsort algorithm must have given himself a cherry lollipop that day. 10-3-94
• Produce announcement: This last month Bartlett pairs have been exceptional. 10-7-94
• My solution is wrong, but I would have given myself full credit. 10-7-94
• Four of you spoke at once, and I didn't have a clue what any of you said, but it sounded good. 10-17-94
• I recommend you read the book, but beware--if you get bored, just skim faster. 10-17-94
• Since last week was so successful [class was cancelled], we'll do it again. There will be no class next Monday. 10-19-94
• Now most of you are thinking "Wow, that's amazing." I can see it in your faces. 10-21-94
• Okay, we'll take a break from the coffee story to do some work. 10-26-94
• Recursion is your friend. Misusing your friend is a problem. 10-28-94
• Given that you've been given the crux of the crux... 10-28-94
• Quicksort is definitely your friend. The problem is that quicksort is everybody's friend. How good a friend can it be if it's everybody's friend? 10-28-94
• If I lost you there fine. I don't really expect this to make sense. 11-2-94
• If you think about this too hard, you're brain will fry because it gets complicated. 11-4-94
• It's kind of like finding out that there's a better way to put on your shirt than putting your head and hands through the holes. Say there's a way that you could just slap it on. That would be surprising, right? 11-4-94
• I am aware of that funniness between the book and me and other people. 11-4-94
• Textbooks treat chaining and open hashing like parents with two kids where one is good and one is bad. They just let the good kid go and they spend all of their time dealing with the bad kid. They should just throw the bad kid out and keep the good kid. 11-11-94 [paraphrased]
• You don't want to do dynamic memory allocation in your microwave. 11-14-94
• Do people know what a vicious cycle is? It's not a killer bicycle. 11-14-94
• If you're gonna make your head hurt you may as well do something right. 11-14-94
• ...we call this... actually, I don't have a term for this. 11-14-94
• We are way behind and my lectures tend to be bad when I'm in a hurry, so I'm going to try to continue calmly with a fire on my butt. 11-16-94
• At least I'm consistently stupid. 11-18-94
• Rob called me a moron. Unfortunately, he was right. 11-18-94
• In my attempt to use the Lucky Charm method of describing this, I will use squares, triangles, and diamonds. 11-28-94
• I've come up with an Acronym for this... if it helps you remember it, great. If it kills a few brain cells, I'm sorry. 12-2-94
• It's kind of like making rice for dinner---It's boring, but if you try to play around with it, you're in trouble. 12-2-94
• Yesterday was a great day, by the way. 12-5-94
• Clearly you don't have enough time in your lifetime to show an infinite number of things. You and your roommate maybe but not you alone. 12-5-94
• This obscure person with a brain the size of a planet proved the first NPC problem was just that. 12-5-94
• We'd hate to get in a circle right? We'd get dizzy after awhile. 12-5-94
• Papoulis is in the process of writing a fourth edition [of his book]---entropy in action. 8-29-94
• If you are looking at the set of kitchen appliances, you don't expect a 1972 Ford Pinto to be thrown in. 8-29-94
• [Backs into projector] Excuse me... Why did I have to ask that projector to excuse me? 8-24-94
• If you don't know what I am talking about, ignore me. My wife usually does. 8-26-94
• Next time we will continue our field trip of EE600. 8-31-94
• We are going to assume that we can do Lagrange integration, even though, we don't have any idea of what it is. 9-7-94
• Aeronautical engineers don't fly airplanes, why should computer engineers use computers? 9-9-94 [attributed to an x-roommate]
• Now that I've completely confused the issue, let me move on to something practical. 9-12-94
• What we will see today is that a random variable is not random and is not a variable. 9-14-94
• We stopped here last time, so it's probably a good place to start. 9-16-94
• A fact is a theorem that we won't prove in this class. 9-19-94
• Furthermore, in the remaining two minutes, and an eternity thereafter, the following is true. 9-23-94
• If you like Fourier transforms you should be happy. If you don't, you should be very sad. 10-19-94
• Enough rattling on. Let's get back to work. 10-21-94
• Let me just shut up and define it. 10-26-94
• Now we are ready to start a new topic and with 6 minutes left and a test next time, you are probably wondering if I am going to drag you through an introduction that you will forget... Yeah, I'm going to do it. 11-14-94
• One man's noise is another man's signal. One person's noise is another person's signal and that is proven in the radio waves in the greater Lafayette area. 11-18-94
• We are going to capitalize on the mistakes of others. 11-18-94
• We are going to start by... after we see that this gets cumbersome, we will learn a common way to punt. 11-21-94
• [After struggling a bit in this lecture] Maybe I should have just called you up this morning and said read the book. 11-28-94
• I didn't get my coffee this morning. I keep making excuses all period long for basic stupidity. 11-28-94
• You may have seen this in high school. I don't remember what was taught in high school anymore. 9-1-94
• Let me do some arm waving & say ... a mathematician would probably shriek if they saw me doing this. 9-8-94
• I can switch the integral and the sum. You can spend a semster studying the conditions on which this is valid, but I have better things to do. 10-5-94
• What I'm doing is setting up the machinery to explain how a CD player works and that involves math. 10-5-94
• [7 weeks into a DSP course] Hopefully most of you know DSP involves processing zeros and ones. 10-5-94
• Well it wasn't that funny, but it was appropriate. 10-25-94
• Let's quickly look at the example since I'm sure it confused you. 10-25-94
• That's akin to our warm fuzzy feeling that things are easier in the frequency domain. 10-25-94
• My form is the right form, but you won't find it in any book. 11-15-94
• So somehow, that... uh... yeah, so... yeah, so there is yeah, so just multiply by two on both sides and you get... yeah so cos(omega/2)... cosine yeah, see, do you believe me on this one? Yeah cosine, so one... that's right so cosine squared of uh... is 1 + cos(omega). 11-28-94
• We are not going to do these integrals, so don't get scared. 12-1-94
• Okay, the third term is going to take a couple lines to fool around with. You're not going to like it, but... 12-6-94
• I'm not with it this morning. 12-8-94
• I'm definately not with it today. 12-8-94
• This is essentially the end of the course. A sad moment. 12-8-94

Student quotes

Experiment 1:

The lessons learned from this experiment were invaluable; I will certainly use these skills for the rest of my natural life. My only real problem in this experiment was getting the computer files to save--a corrupt temp file ruined my life last week. While this is unfortunate, life goes on. I certainly do not fault myself for this; instead I fault a society overly-reliant upon machines. 9-13-94

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...and the signal corresponding to Output D1 was happily careening toward oblivion (i.e., an unconnected terminal set). The above errata I corrected with alacrity. 9-13-94

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Experiment 2:

Besides being the highlight of my month, this lab served to increase my understanding of the use of NAND/NAND or NOR/NOR replacements for AND/OR circuits. The reasons for using NAND and NOR gates are legion...

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Experiment 3:

In conclusion, this was yet another utterly gratifying and satisfying lab.

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In the circuit as you can see I used three-input Nand gates because if I used a two-input I would have to buy two chips. So I'm saving some money to buy stamps to send letters to my friends back home.

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Experiment 5:

I didn't even try to get the NOR NOR expression and check if is simpler because I'm beautiful [sic] and I can do whatever I want. Well to tell you the truth I didn't do it because...

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Experiment 10:

Actually I was amassed from my self. For a minute I thought that I discovered something important and that I was going to get a Nobel price or something. Further down at the trial part I'm showing my first trial where I didn't use And gates. As we can see on the waveform we are way off. The reason I have it on my lab report is because I liked the wave form. [All errors present in actual report]

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Experiment 10:

For the second part, a 4-bit synchronous up-counter is to be designed; it is also to be implemented using components from our handy utility belts...uh, tool kits....

And now we do the happy "experiment is done" dance.

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Experiment 11:

This Thanksgiving I will be going home with my girlfriend. None of her relative are engineers so they will most likely not care too terribly much about my blinking lights. There is, however, one exception. Jonny, the 2 year old likes bright flashing things, they make him drool. If I listen carefully between the characteristic Gaa Doooo sounds, I might just hear the "I want to be an electrical engineer" that so many kids are saying these days.

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Experiment 11:

Who was most impressed by the work I have done? By far my mother. In fact, she read every single report I have written for this class up to this one. She even had me explaining how AND gates work! I tried explaining other stuff but I lost her quickly. I told her not to feel bad, it took us 3 months to understand this stuff! She feels we should get more than 1 hour credit for a class that we put so much work into. I agree! But, other than this, she acted like the typical proud mother, which got a little embarrassing when I had to show all the neighbors my stop light!

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Experiment 12:

Parts List: ...

Lots of itsy bitsy wires in a rainbow of fruity flavors

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Experiment 12:

Some idiot race wants a counter that would count from 2 to 1 in the following manner: 2-4-6-7-3-1, and repeat from 2 again.... And if this wasn't bad enough, the idiots can't even read binary. So I have to design the circuit to display the numbers on a seven segment display, which I don't think they can read; but I will not go any further to compensate for their stupidity.

I'm supposed to use J-K flip flops and any other gates. If it was up to me I would make the design as expensive as possible. But I'm sure that my nice TA wouldn't approve and probably fail me!