The Long Road

03/21/2003 Archived Entry: "Unsatisfiable"

Pmath 330, GREAT course. The material is interesting, the prof is fun, the assignments are relatively easy, the class average is high. But, in the last 3 months we've yet to get a single assignment back! What on earth could be going on? Is the marker completely incompetent? Its been so bad that the prof has cut back on the number of assignments he was suppose to give us. It was planned to be around 10-15 assignments over the term but we've only just handed in our fourth. The prof even said on Wednesday that any assignment that we don't get back we'll just get 100% on! Deal!

Here's a story from the best lecture I've had this term. Its not word for word what happened (obviously), just to the best of my memory.
We're about five minutes into the Pmath lecture.
Ross, the pmath prof: "So, seeing as you're all Waterloo students, you would notice that this set of equations is the negation of a tautology so will always be false. But if you were from another school, say...WESTERN, you wouldn't notice that and take the long way to solve it."
a female Student in the front row: "But I'm from Western!"
Ross: "Really? What are you doing here?"
Student: "We're on our week long March break this week and next week" (this occured in mid February)
Ross: "Okay...well why don't you come up here and help me out"
The student goes up to the blackboard.
Ross: "So what's your name?"
Student: "Jill"
Ross: "ok Jill,what would you do if you were told that this equation is unsatisfiable?"
Jill: "WELL, I'd try my hardest to satisfy it of course!!"
Ross *looks around* : "What I meant was, how would you go about proving that it was unsatisfiable."
Jill: "OH! what I would do is construct a set of clauses representing each equation and resolve them over each unit until I'm left with either a null set or an empty set"
Ross: "That sounds about right, thank you very much Jill"
Jill: "no problem" and she leaves the room.
Ross continues on with the lecture as if women from Western were an everyday occurence in class.

After a minute or so, someone asks him who the girl was. Turns out Jill is Ross' daughter who apparently had nothing better to do that day than to participate in a little skit her dad prepared for the class??? Isn't that awesome? A prof caring enough about his students' entertainment to do something like that. The best is imagining Ross at home saying something like "hey Jill, do you want to do a skit for my class?", "umm...sure... I guess". hehehehe =)

Replies: 1 Comment

In class skits are fun!

Posted by Romer @ 03/21/2003 04:46 PM EST