18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 36

[cahn]

Starting a couple of comments earlier than usual to mention there are a couple of new salon fics! These probably both need canon knowledge.

felis ficlets on siblings!

Siblings (541 words) by felisnocturna
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758), Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758)
Summary:

Three Fills for the 2022 Three Sentence Ficathon.

Chapter One: Protective Action / Babysitting at Rheinsberg (Frederick/Fredersdorf, William+Henry+Ferdinand)
Chapter Two: Here Be Lions (Wilhelmine)

Unsent Letters fic by me:

Letters for a Dead King (1981 words) by raspberryhunter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen (1726-1802)
Characters: Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802)
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Love/Hate, Talking To Dead People, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family
Summary:

Just because one's king and brother is dead doesn't mean one has to stop writing to him.

Comments

Re: Letters and Journals of Mrs Calderwood

[cahn]

ahhhh Luzula, this is great and I hope to write more later in between trips #2 and #3, but just wanted to say

MacLaurin expansion fame

Clearly I studied the wrong kind of math. TIL!

It's just a Taylor series! ...mildred, please tell me your college physics class did Taylor series?? It's the only part of calculus I still use on a very regular basis, at least conceptually, because it's such a useful way of thinking about approximations when you just take the first couple of terms for small x.

(Heh, I just had a conversation with my best-friend-the-math-educator last week where we were talking about math pedagogy, and she pointed out that Taylor series are really the most useful part of calculus for the vast majority of people, and it's really irritating that in most high school calculus it gets shoved to the back -- and if one takes Calculus AB, like I did because it was what my school had, it never gets mentioned at all. I was really fortunate that I got this gap covered at second high school. But it was physics where it got really hammered in because it gets used everywhere for approximations!)

Re: Letters and Journals of Mrs Calderwood

[mildred_of_midgard]

...mildred, please tell me your college physics class did Taylor series??

If we did, it left no trace in my memory, much like the October 1752 entry on the disappearance of the non-cousin Marschall!

Keep in mind, I only did two semesters of physics, before switching my major from physics, where they expected us to do math without teaching us math, to math, where they taught us math before expecting us to do it. (My physics prof was very surprised at the following facts:

1. I was noticeably better than my classmates at a number of physics problems that were heavily math-focused.
2. I complained that the math was the reason I was dropping my physics major.
3. I was switching my major to math.

I told him it could all be explained by the fact that I was extremely good at math if and only if you actually taught me the math first!)

Re: Letters and Journals of Mrs Calderwood

[luzula]

I teach math to physics majors! At my university the physics program has four mandatory math courses...but I suppose you didn't study in Sweden. : )

Re: Letters and Journals of Mrs Calderwood

[mildred_of_midgard]

I did not. ;)

At MY university, there were the officially posted math requirements, which said, "If you are taking physics class X, you must be taking math class Y simultaneously," and then there were the secret math requirements which you only found out when you were taking the class, and which consisted of "Physics class X professor will assign problems that presuppose you have taken math class Z," and that, my friends, is why I did not succeed in my originally intended physics major. Had the official requirements said, "Don't take X until you've taken Y *and* Z," I might have a physics degree too!

*grumble*

(Instead, I have a math degree.)

ETA: Mind you, there were other problems with how physics was taught that played a role, such as the fact that lectures consisted of proofs, while homework and tests consisted of solving problems, which meant you were basically lecture-less and were teaching yourself physics on the side. In math class, they either taught us to solve problems and tested us on solving problems, or taught us proofs and tested us on proofs! (Also in high school physics, they taught us problem-solving and tested us on problem-solving.)

Re: Letters and Journals of Mrs Calderwood

[cahn]

Oh, I didn't realize that, that is very cool! (I knew you taught math at a university, but not to physics majors!)

I bet your university does not do the thing that MY university did, which is that the extremely-highly-recommended (not actually mandatory) math courses for physics (I think there were indeed four) in principle taught you the math you need to know for physics classes, but crucially not in the same order the physics classes expected you to know them! First-semester mechanics expected you to know vectors and matrices, but linear algebra was not taught until second semester (first semester math was multivariate calculus). (If you hadn't had single-variable calculus yet, you had to do another sequence of both math and physics which I don't know about.) So what happened was that the first-semester mechanics class basically taught a crash course in linear algebra in the middle so that they could do any of it... Maybe, twenty-five years later, this has changed. I hope so!

I can't remember Taylor series explicitly being taught in college (then again I kind of think they expected us to already know them), but I think every single class I had made approximations that were the first term or two of a Taylor series!

Re: Letters and Journals of Mrs Calderwood

[luzula]

Well, I don't just teach on the physics program, I also teach on the math program and on the math teacher program. Anyway, the physics program has meetings with all the people teaching on it to make sure that we teach things in the right order and so that the students always have the prerequisite knowledge they need.

It boggles me that multivariate calculus would be taught before linear algebra! Never mind the physics, that just doesn't make sense from a math standpoint. I mean, in multivariate calculus you need to multiply matrices, to calculate determinants, to find the equations of planes, etc.

Math and physics

[mildred_of_midgard]

Your math and physics departments talk to each other?! The mind boggles. Well done, Sweden.

Math and physics

[mildred_of_midgard]

Similar but slightly different for me. Assuming you'd had single variable calculus in high school, it went:

First semester: multivariate calculus for math; Newtonian mechanics for physics
Second semester: vector calculus for math; waves, optics, and thermo for physics
Third semester: linear algebra for math; electromagnetics for physics

First semester mechanics expected you to know at least vector calc, so what happened was that the first-semester mechanics class basically taught a crash course in linear algebra in the middle so that they could do any of it went ahead and did it anyway, telling you "you should already know this," notwithstanding that the prereq for course enrollment in the official catalog was "concurrent enrollment in multivariate calc." *banging head*

Whether we were expected to know Taylor series but never taught them, covered them but I forgot, or I just didn't stick around long enough to encounter them, I have no idea. (Suspect the third, though.)