It is made up entirely of corners

ok ... you've just made me take a couple of advils for my headache ... very interesting concept, btw

 

The last Calculus problem I remember goes something like this:
A snow plow leaves the station at 5 pm and plows 6 miles of road in 2 hours.
Another snow plow leaves the station at 6 pm and plows 5 miles of road in 3 hours.
How many flapjacks are required to shingle a dog house?

No, really, "How fast is it snowing?"
WTF? Five thirds of a truck worth of horsepower?

Then I switched to air conditioning.

 

ok ... you've just made me take a couple of advils for my headache ... very interesting concept, btw

To make your head hurt less, a corner is well represented by the absolute value function at x = 0. It is continuous at that point but the derivative ceases to exist, and the limits of the derivative from the left and the right are different. You can google Brownian Motion or the Wiener process for more info on this strange animal.

 

You can't be good at EE without being good at math, and I have certain skills. But my other brother is an actual math guy, undergrad at Notre Dame and grad at Harvard, both full-ride scholarships. His brain is kinda scary.

ak

 

You can't be good at EE without being good at math...

In my opinion, you also need to be fairly comfortable with math (some math, anyway) just to be able to get much enjoyment out of electronics as a hobby; otherwise, a person is limited to making verbatim copies of things that other people have designed. Algebra, at an absolute minimum, is a must. The basics of trigonometry and calculus help, too.

 

Agree, but hobbyists rarely need the hyperbolic cosecant of, well, anything.

ak

 

Agree, but hobbyists rarely need the hyperbolic cosecant of, well, anything.

Very true. But that goes well beyond the "basics" I had in mind...

 

Algebra, at an absolute minimum, is a must. The basics of trigonometry and calculus help, too.

That's about where I'm at. Pretty good at algebra, can do trig when necessary, and rarely understand how to apply Calculus to anything.

 

...and rarely understand how to apply Calculus to anything.

My opinion is that for a hobbyist, simply grasping the concepts of integration and differentiation and how they relate to circuits containing capacitors and inductors is enough. Anyone doing electronics for fun has little need-- if any at all-- for analytical calculus.