every time someone says they're bad at math I feel an urge to help them understand math better and usually they don't want that

@Felthry

I'm having trouble with Calc 3, and I think it's because vectors are that special combination of "I've done this a million times" and "specific technique that looks like 3+ others, but each has a very different purpose so you can't mix them up ever."

@Tathar if you want some help I'll gladly provide it

@Felthry

Yes please. I need practice with tangent vectors, normals, binormals, and some other stuff.

@Tathar okay, binormal is not a term we're familiar with; whatever it is, it isn't something that's come up in our work. we probably learned about it a few years ago and forgot

so, tangent and normal to what, anyway?

@Felthry

I'll have to look up my notes after class.

@Felthry

Ah, here we go: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/CalcIII/TangentNormalVectors.aspx

@Tathar it's been a long time since we've thought about vectors with the ijk formalism instead of as n×1 matrices, wow

@Felthry
Does this mean it gets easier?

@Tathar possibly; the stuff we work in just has a different way of looking at things for the most part

a lot of engineering is trying to figure out where you can avoid the difficult math without sacrificing your approximation too much, really (largely because you want to do stuff that can be easily done by a computer very quickly, since a lot of engineering involves a lot of equation solving repeatedly)

@Tathar differential equations and elaborations thereof are most of what we do

@Felthry
I haven't even touched those yet.

@Tathar There's not as much complicated stuff to memorize, trust me

at least in engineering, the main thing to learn about differential equations is the concepts; the actual solving of them is generally done by simulink

@Felthry

What should I expect from the Foundation Exam then?

@Tathar What's the foundation exam?