WEEKLY WHINE

Arbitrarily finding things

It can be difficult searching for topics of each week's Whines. Thus, when it came time to search for a topic this week, I figured I should do just that: search. So I went to Altavista and searched for the phrase "partial derivative". As you are probably aware by now, I like math, so I decided to do a math search. I expected that many of the results would be the sites of college math courses, possibly class notes or homework solutions. Here is what I came up with.

Note: If you try this search yourself, you could well get different results. Altavista tends to give similar but not identical results when a search is repeated.

Second Partial Derivative of the Signal Term

http://xfactor.wpi.edu/Works/CRWDiss/node79.html

This is actually a page from the PhD dissertation of Charles Russell Wright. He submitted "Multidimensional Direction of Arrival Performance Bounds and Optimization for Nonstationary Noise" at Worchester Polytechnic Institute in 1994. This page includes a sample calculation of the second partial derivative of a matrix element. Overall, it's basically what you'd expect out of a PhD dissertation.

partial derivative equations

http://www.cisti.nrc.ca/irc/thesaurus/partial_derivative_equatio.html

This is simply the readout of "partial derivative equations" from the Canadian Thesaurus of Construction Science and Technology, dating back to 1978. It's a publication of the Canadian government. The entry is not all that helpful for English speakers, since the only English synonym provided is "equations(maths)", with the abbreviation BT for "broader term". However, it also provides the French term [FT], "equation aux derivees partielles".

EECS 800 - Partial Derivative Calculation

http://www.tisl.ukans.edu/~emetz/classes/800-2.html

This file belongs to someone named Edu Metz, who was a grad student at the University of Kansas. One of his projects in the fall of 1995 was this C program for a class called EECS 800: Digital Image Processing. This program would calculate partial derivatives of the input image.

Partial Derivative

http://astsun.astro.virginia.edu/~eww6n/math/PartialDerivative.html

As the URL indicates, this is probably from someone at the University of Virginia's astronomy department. Using this link made my browser start looking for the www.treasure-troves.com domain name. However, it failed to find it, classifying this location in the "broken link" category.

No Title

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/SHYIP/shy-errata.txt

This is an errata file for Oz Shy's textbook Industrial Organization: Theory and Applications. The book is intended to be a semimathematical introduction to the theory behind industrial organization. Errata involving partial derivatives were found on pages 52 and 121. The error on page 52 was actually included twice in this list, for reasons unknown. MIT Press publishes the book in paperback for about $30.

Finance D60 Programs/Spreadsheets

http://kent.kellogg.nwu.edu/D60/programs.html

This is a list of spreadsheets and other programs used in the Finance D60: Investments graduate course at Northwestern University's Kellogg School. Included in this list are some Mathematica files, including two with Black-Scholes partial derivative plots.

Milestone #2

http://www.science.gmu.edu/~tpiselli/801ms2.html

This is the second milestone attained by Group 7 in their CSI 801 class in the fall of 1996. CSI 801, Foundations of Compuational Sciences, is taught at George Mason University. Apparently Group 7's task was to simulate the transport of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [PAHs] through the infamous meteorite, ALH84001, the one that contains evidence for primitive life on Mars. They concluded that based upon their assumptions, it was possible for ALH84001 to have been contaminated with terrestrial PAHs over a time span as short as 170 years. The phrase "partial derivative" appears twice in Milestone #2.

vector.calculus.net Home Page

http://vector.calculus.net/

This site appears to be a bit incomplete. Sure enough, it has a section called "Derivatives in 3D", including three sections with "partial derivative" in the title. Unfortunately, none of these sections have anything in them! The place has a great listing of topics that calculus students should know, but it doesn't actually elaborate on any of them.

QDS Neural Net Lab

http://www.qds.com/neural.htm

When I tried to reach this location, it told me that the firewall failed to penetrate to 209.170.18.221, which apparently is the IP address of this server. This is too bad, because it sounded interesting.

No Title

http://bradley.edu/~mou/tf223

This location yielded a 404. I have absolutely no idea what it had to do with partial derivatives, but it was from Bradley University, ranked fifth in the Midwest by US News and World Report.