I was at a party on Saturday night and a friend asked what type of math class I am taking. I said “Discrete Math.” In response, she said that she had never heard of it, and was going to Google it. Another friend said that she would not find it on Google because it was “discreet” math! Cheesy joke, but it made the engineers and non-engineers at the party laugh!
Graphs
Yesterday and today my focus is on Chapter 10 of the book, which covers graphs. To my happy surprise, this is my favorite chapter of the book so far. The homework is quite interesting, and for whatever reason, it seems to instinctively make sense to me. I got a bit excited and started looking into taking an additional graph theory class, but … I cannot get too far ahead of myself, since my final is Saturday. The concepts fit together without as much mental manipulation and I can also see concrete uses.
One set of examples in the book involved a module dependency graph and a precedence graph. I remember building my first web app. I met with one of my mentors and white boarded my data model for my PostGreSQL database. However, I did not spend any time thinking about modeling the app overall. The result was that after I got the core functionality in place, my advisor looked at what I had done, led me to the whiteboard and we spoke about refactoring, and how the code would best fit together. I am thankful for my advisor and always keep this in mind. Now, I have a new tool, module dependency graphs and precedence graphs, courtesy of my math class (!) that I can use to help structure apps and other work upfront. Since I am need to work on my final project for my JavaScript class, I am about to apply these concepts this week!
The lawyer in me also enjoyed looking at graphs that are wheels. The diagrams and explanations in the book were oddly reminiscent of my criminal law class…. I can still remember professor Lee explaining what a hub and spoke conspiracy is, Interstate Circuit v. U.S…
michdcode 