I spent a good part of the morning going through KhanAcademy high school calculus series. Why? Well, I had a differential equation to solve.
During this week’s lecture on Gossip protocols the Prof gave an interesting challenge of solving a differential equation. Now generally, I suck at proofs and I used to be the student who directly jumps at the proofs rather than working through them on his/her own. But today was different from school days - I had no fear of exams, or pressure of deadlines or the need to quickly finish homework before it gets dark outside (which would ruin the little playtime I earned in the evenings).
So with the entire weekend to myself, a glass of hot milk and some awesome ambient music in my ears, I decided to brush the dust off those differential and integral concepts.
Long thing short, I had a fantastic time revising the identities, reading handouts on integration by parts and mostly drawing integrals in my notebook - after such a long time!
Much to my delight, after spending a good deal of time, rummaging thorough some notes and math websites I was able to successfully solve the differential equation! It also inspired me to type down the proof in a LaTeX document so that I could share it with other students. For the time being it seems as if I’m going to write all my notes in LaTeX.
If you’re interested, you can checkout the proof here.