Being Mathematica

My prediction of the difficulty of my first three papers were a bit off. PC4130 wasn't all that tough. It was pretty manageable, except for certain parts which I'm not sure what the question was asking for. MA2213 was more difficult, to be honest, although that's probably because I couldn't be bothered memorising the proofs and formulae involved in quantifying the errors of various numerical integration schemes.

But I was right on the spot for PC4248 - it was murderous. For two hours I had the experience of what it was like being Mathematica. Man, I was there throwing around algebra: solving for the Schwarzchild Christoffel symbols and attempting to get an effective potential equation for the Kerr metric.

It wore me down so much that I skipped the third question which involves calculating the Riemann curvature tensor and went ahead to the fourth one (we were to do three out of four). I had completely no idea how to do the fourth question, but I sure had enough of calculation to avoid it at all cost, even if it means losing a few marks (at least I can crap out a few marks for the third question).

Gosh, you know, the textbook we use provides the Mathematica codes for calculating these variables, simply because it's too tedious to be done by hand in most except the simple cases. Okay, fine, the one about the Schwarzchild Christoffel symbols are not that tough, but the remainder are full of pain to do.

But at least it's over. And PC3274 won't be that tough (despite it being a "mathematical" module), that's for sure.