Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site oddjob.UChicago.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!houxm!ihnp4!gargoyle!oddjob!matt 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