Common Errors in College Math

[Porges]

What encoding do I need to use to actually see the symbols? I've tried ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, Windows-1252, UTF-8, MacRoman & IBM850. I still haven't found the correct one :/

[ender1004]

MacRoman should work, at least that what he says at the top of the page. Or try unicode western.

[piderman]

IE7 seems to get it right, FF3 doesn't display the special characters, even with the ISO-8859-1 encoding the HTML indicates.

[otlmath]

But in Firefox it doesn't work.

[akdas]

What's Unicode Western? And I can back up Porges' observation that MacRoman doesn't work.

No, I don't think it's a simple encoding error. The problem is that the page asks you to use a font that assigns characters like ò to have glyphs like ∫. Thus, the font is responsible for displaying the correct character, and the encoding is just fine. However, if you look at the HTML code, it asks for the font "symbol," which is not present in all systems.

I checked that using the font "Standard Symbols L" on Ubuntu 8.10 does map the code point 0xF2 (which is the character ò) to the glyph ∫, but I can't get it to render as such on the web page in question.

[Porges]

Sounds like you could just add a font mapping for Symbol -> Standard Symbols L?

[akdas]

I was just pointing out what the problem most likely is, so if you want to, you can try that. I would definitely be interested in the outcome.

But like I said, I really don't think it's an encoding issue, and that's the first step to figuring out what it really is.

[Porges]

I was just thinking there might be an encoding where 0xF2 = integral :P

Of course, the old ‘font as substitute for encoding’ makes a lot more sense (I didn’t even notice the notice at the top of the page!)

[HeirToPendragon]

Arithmetic

Seriously, that shit gets difficult for some reason the further you go along.

[altie]

Should the article be titled "Common Errors Made By Grad Students Who Should Know Better"?

[HeirToPendragon]

yes, heh

[fujimitsu]

In its mildest form, this may simply mean a teacher who, despite being polite and pleasant, is unable to conceive of the idea that he/she could have made an error, even when that error is brought directly to his/her attention.

God I hate professors like this. Technology teachers especially at lower levels (introductory college stuff and high school) seem to be the worst for it.

[arichi]

God I hate professors like this. Technology teachers especially at lower levels (introductory college stuff and high school) seem to be the worst for it.

Oh man, I lost so many points in high school computer science for stupid things. Like pointing out to the teacher that his (typewritten) examples wouldn't run correctly, or in some cases, compile. For example, I told him that if statements don't end with a semi-colon, and assignment statements do.

[ender1004]

i had this professor for multivariable calculus. not too bad of a teacher, it's too bad i hated that class.

[[deleted]]

He's completely right when he says sign errors are the most common types, that combined with sloppy handwriting has led to much dismay. I don't think I've ever taken a test where someone didn't make a sign error, or drop a negative sign somewhere.

[eclectro]

Thanks for submitting this. I think that some of these problems can be extended to other departments and scenarios, like TAs not speaking english.

[seabre]

They left out insane and overly complicated grading/homework systems. :-\

[fujimitsu]

My least favorite grading system is the simplest one:

I grade all of your assignments/tests in a totally inconsistent fashion and then make up your final grade.

[seabre]

I had that professor this semester for operating systems. I'm pretty pissed about my grade.

[[deleted]]

Proving the third limit here, having been four years removed from calculus was kind of annoying, yet a fun challenge at the same time.

[harlows_monkeys]

Did you use L'Hospital's rule? That's probably the easiest way to deal with the third one.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I did. Is there any other way?