Can't Look It Up If You've Never Heard Of It

(You can watch the video version of this post on YouTube.)

Hello there, I’m Thomas and I’m a computer scientist. When I was a first year student in Utrecht, we had a mandatory maths course, “Maths for Computer Scientists,” and .. I don’t even know what was in there anymore; I forgot most of it soon after the exam, I guess. And people did complain like: why do I need to learn this? “I’m never going to use this.” Well, first of all, you’re learning how to write a proof, and things like that, but here’s the thing: I’m not so sure you’re never going to use it. Not ALL of it, surely, but SOME of it. You don’t really know beforehand who’s going to end up using .. WHAT. So what you do in a course like that, is you show everybody just, like, a bunch of stuff. Just enough of it that they’ll know there’s something to look it up if they ever need it.

Years later, I was trying to prove something and I was like, hey, maybe a Taylor series would actually be useful here, how did that work again? Looked it up and was able to solve the problem - just because, somewhat randomly, I had heard of it in this maths course. So that’s what I’d like these videos to be … stuff that I think is interesting and, uh, might help you to have heard of. Cause you can’t look it up if you’ve never heard of it.