physicists doing math be like - eviltoast
  • gbzm@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    You have no idea. This is tame compared to some of the shit I seen in my masters.

    I remember one time we had an exercise where the calculation yielded a violently nonconvergent improper integral.

    Now, we had already been introduced to some “tricks” to “deal with” those. And I do mean “tricks” as in magic. Arcane spells best described as “praying to the obscure gods of Borel summation until some incantation accidentally summoned untold horrors that would swallow infinities into fractional dimensions converging to zero” or some bullshit like that.

    But this one was so bizarre that the whole class was stumped. Our runes were powerless, what remained of our sanities was fraying and disappearing into the abyss that kept lookingback for more.

    Then the TA just tsk’d at our collective weakness, deadass looked into each of our eyeballs and wrote this on the blackboard

    I almost puked on the spot