Can the mane six discover calculus fast enough to win a flying competition, counter a deadly parasite, and destroy a tornado?
Welcome to the only MLP fanfiction which doubles as a calculus tutorial.
Once this fic is complete, it will serve as a complete walkthrough for calculus. I want to teach the intuitive side of math: tell you why things work, and make you feel like you could have discovered them yourself.
Petition your teacher to make this your school's standard textbook.
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My prayers have been answered!
This is an interesting premise. I hope that this fic will teach me a little bit about the basics of calculus.
I see someone uses WolframAlpha. Definitely a good read for someone in calc, like me.
Oh wow. Teaching calculus with ponies? I see nothing wrong with this idea. And you've even included some Flash animation. This is awesome.
It's been a few years since I've taken any math classes, so we'll have to see what I remember.
As for the answer (assuming I remember how to do math correctly):
It looks to me that at the bottom of her loop, her cutie mark travels from the 0pl marker to the 0.6pl marker in one frame (1/30s).
(0.6pl)/(1/30s) = (0.6*30)pl/s = 18pl/s
That's lower that Twilight's prediction, and it seemed surprisingly easy. Did I mess something up?
I was kind of hoping that Pinkie's box would be a calculator. I'm not even sure I know how to do math without one anymore.
For those who are too lazy to watch the animation, it's clear that Rainbow takes more than one frame to traverse the length of the ruler.
If she were moving faster than 30 ponylengths/sec then she would pass the stick in a single frame, since the camera takes 30 frames per second.
Hence she's not breaking the speed limit.
Very cool idea, and it's even accompanied by a flash animation! Definitely watching this one.
4941214
I came to the same conclusion. At first, I measured from her front hoof, which in one frame went from .3 pl to .8 pl (.5 pl) but after reading your comment I looked at the cutie mark. Her speed then does appear to be 18 pl/s
This seemed way to easy, even for entry level Calc.
4941366
Yeah, I got that measurement at first too. But since the result from doing it that way (15pl/s) seemed too small, I looked for alternatives that would give a better result. Though admittedly, this result isn't that much better.
The apparent simplicity of this question did throw me off too. But I suppose that most math classes, at least in high school, do tend to start with a super-simple overview of everything you should already know that the rest of the class will then build on.
4941264
And here we have the clever guy who figures out the answer the easy way.
4941495
This week it's Pony Calculus Answers: brought to you by The Letter J !
God Dang you, cellphone. I'd love to figure it out by myself. I'm a math freak myself so... aaaaaaahhhhhhhh. Frustration.
This is relevant to my interests!
Liked and faved!
Also, typo detected:
Should be ponylengths.
I hate maths, but I like this.
4941495
As my first-year calc prof said, "Mathematicians are lazy". Go for the elegant proof!
and I'm on my laptop. lets say 0.8 ponylenghts in two frames. so 0.8 PL in four seconds. multiplied by fifteen is (four sec*15 = 60) and 0.8 * 15 = 12.
so I say 12 PL/S
the trick is slow enough for the competition.
New all-time favorite fanfic 4th wall breach.
W-why would you make this? YOU MONSTER!!! *cries* *sobs*
*full-on weeping*
I was going to use this to remember my calculus ... but so far it's a question and not a study-help.
Lead us through a problem. THEN present a similar problem. Then present a dissimilar problem.
Really hoping this works out, I'd love to remember my calculus ...
4942248
That's the exact same thing they've been telling me since my first year in secondary school.
4942598 *wraps arms around you murmuring consoling words*
4945177 *gets soothed enough to talk* W-why would you do this?
4945198 It's okay. Shhh. Go read something fluffy and happy.
4945409 I cannot feel... Only pain, and sadness... No Empathy, no Compassion... Just pain...
4945418 just read this.
4945480 ...Still nothing.
I don't think that I've seen an author attempt to weave a mathematical word problem into a (relatively fleshed-out) fanfic narrative before, and I'm impressed with just how well it works.
The only similar concept to this which I can recall ATM is Pineta's "The Tao of Two Pie" story, which explains some fundamental mathematical *principles* through pony narrative, but doesn't have an actual 'problem' to solve, per se. Come to think of it, Pineta has quite a few good edu-tainment pony stories. The two of you ought to share notes and collaborate on something IMHO.
You've got my attention. Great to see another writer playing my favourite game of mixing ponies and science. This was well written and the animation worked well. I look forward to reading more.
I once created an analogy which explained certain aspects of chemistry and nuclear physics via people on rocket powered roller skates(protons, with the rollerskate settings being heat) trading the scarves that were their only clothing(electrons) between the groups that clung together for social purposes (atoms), and were themselves held together by monkeys (neutrons).
Alas, for this text is lost to the mists of time. It was pretty good.
My point, however, is that however good your work is, you are setting your (initial) goal too high by suggesting that people should ask their teachers to make this (when and if finished) an actual text... now something they refer students who are having problems to, or even if you could get a DVD ROM version available (or CD ROM for older school computers), that might be of use as a supplemental teaching method. When and if this is wildly successful, THEN you could start thinking "textbook".
I look forward to seeing this thing's progress.
I'll just leave this here.
Nervo-cited.
On a scale of 1 to America, how free are you?
4941495
The Second Chapter has proved you right. Good Job.
4964948 That's the ENTIRE premise of THIS fic!
Thanks for the comments!
Quick edit - the speed limit in chapter 1 was supposed to be 20, not 30. Of all the things I could get wrong, of course it'd be a math error
Chapter 3 will go up this Saturday.
I was wrong? How can I be wrong? .... *crack* my honour
I've a bad fever the past few days, so Chapter 3 is moving from "Saturday" to "Definitely by Tuesday, and hopefully earlier." Apologies for the delay.
Calculus is boring. Discrete math is where it's at.
Rainbow Dash and the other pegasi ought to have an intuitive, instinctive understanding of calculus. Their flying and whatnot requires immediate and unconscious calculations of continuous quantities.
*Le head tilt.* Math? OH NOES!!! MATH!!!!
*Flashbacks of failing algebra class*
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO- Oh hey, this all kinda makes sense now....
How many chapters could we be expecting?
This is possibly the greatest thing I have ever seen here of all time.
And right when I'm starting Calculus, too!
So the puzzle is figuring out what "angle of the tornado" means? The only thing that leaves a worse taste in my mouth than cilantro is improperly defined variables.
Angular displacement? Angular velocity? Angular acceleration? Angle of the cone of the tornado?
If the "angle of the tornado" is indeed the angular displacement, then Rainbow would be right in saying that the tornado would be moving anemically slow for the first minute of its existence. It would also imply that the tornado is speeding up, which wouldn't make sense in the context of the question, since you'd need some net angular force i.e torque in order to increase the rotational speed.
Whereas keeping speed constant would imply that the "angle of the tornado" would have to be the third integral of angular displacement with respect to time in order for it to be quadratic. This would be "angular jerk", which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about.
I'm stumped.
Too bad I don't understand calculus yet. At least I can use this fic as reference if I do decide to take this class.
Can you inline images? If so, give latex2png a shot. The downside is that the legibility will be dependent on the reader's theme, and it doesn't expand gracefully like text does for readers who need that. If you're not familiar with LaTeX math mode syntax, try the editor at codecogs.com, which provides a menu (and a live preview). However, the codecogs one produces a gif. Gifs only support 1-bit transparency, so they have the edges of the text fade towards white before becoming transparent, which looks really bad on anything other than a white background. The latex2png image fades to transparent instead of white (since png supports doing that), so while it will always be black characters it will look good on any background that black characters look good on (also, you can choose the size of the image). So maybe use the codecogs one to edit and then copy and paste the code into latex2png?
If you can't inline images, you could ask your readers to install TeX the World (chrome, firefox) and write the math as [; <LaTeX code here> ;]. This is not exactly optimal. You could also write the whole chapter in LaTeX, compile it to pdf, host the pdf somewhere and link to it in the author's note. This will give you some beautifully typeset chapters, but it's still a bit of a hassle for your readers.
Edit: An example of LaTeX math typesetting can be seen here (this is part of the table of integrals I put together for my Calc 2 reference sheet (photocopying the table in the back of the book was illegible at the required scale)): image
Unless I'm missing something, there isn't enough information here.
speed = distance / time
there is no distance mentioned.
do they actually mean RPMs instead of airspeed?
5013633
Add a white stroke to the text. It might be ugly, but less than having a white background.
I don't think this can be easily done in LaTeX, so Gimp or Photoshop might be needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrwl6a4-lSg
Limits! (Essentially.) Now we're really doing calculus!