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From: matt@oddjob.UChicago.UUCP (Matt Crawford)
Newsgroups: net.college,net.flame
Subject: Re: Does someone REALLY belive this?
Message-ID: <527@oddjob.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 7-Nov-84 22:45:05 EST
Article-I.D.: oddjob.527
Posted: Wed Nov  7 22:45:05 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Nov-84 08:10:29 EST
References: 
Reply-To: matt@oddjob.UUCP ( Crawford)
Organization: U. Chicago: Astronomy & Astrophysics
Lines: 29
Summary: 

Ken Hollis quotes from a newspaper:
> Why don't we start calculating what these machines are doing?  If we don't,
> we may have scientific and sophisticated equipment with no one knowledgeable
> enough to use it.
> 
>           Helen Alexander
>           Winter Park

And comments:
> Well? Any comments? By the way, Winter Park is a small town north of
> Orlando, mostly suburb and 'higher income'.  I personally would like
> to ask this lady to multiply two 100X100 matrices together, and see
> which year she gets them done....(;->)

To which I respond:
When I was an undergrad in Applied Math at Caltech, I had a classmate who
had worked a summer for .  He did numerical
problems there, and was asked by an engineer to invert a matrix of
dimension approximately 200x200.  After the machine ground out the answer
(this was about 10 years ago) my friend thought the numbers looked
familiar.  He asked the engineer "Does this matrix represent a rotation in
some sense?"  The answer was in the affirmative.  "Then the inverse is the
transpose, idiot!"

Computer literacy should in no way be substitued for thinking, nor mistaken
for it.
_____________________________________________________
Matt		University	crawford@anl-mcs.arpa
Crawford	of Chicago	ihnp4!oddjob!matt