Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Final exam hints

The final exam is really difficult. My wife asked me if it was difficult because you all hadn't studied enough or something, and my reply was "no, they have studied, it is just really difficult." Then I decided I should probably help get you started a little bit ...

Even with massive hints, some of them are still very hard (or messy, or both). They are more open-ended problems than you are probably used to, requiring approximations or assumptions that you have to come up with on your own to generate reasonable solutions. With one exception, not the sort of problems where you just identify formulas or set up an integral or two. If there is a lesson here, I guess it is that realistic problems are messy and difficult, and half the time you don't even know where to start. The trick is to figure out how to make it look approximately like one of the nice tidy textbook problems, without sacrificing too much in the way of accuracy or realism.

Anyway: here are the massive hints I spoke of. I also corrected a typo in number 4 - it should be "b/a" in the log, not "a/b".

No comments:

Post a Comment