I'm not a nerd! Really!

Well, I've alway hated that when people call me a nerd... not that it happens so often, but it's still a pet peeve. But I have to admit this one. At least it might come across nerdy (in a math way, mind you). This last Wednesday, I purchased a couple of software packages: Matlab (http://www.matlab.com/) which I need for software simulation and control system design and Mathematica (http://www.mathematica.com/) which I am planning to use for pure idea exploration in the math domain. I have used matlab for several years now, and it is very useful for the reasons I've listed above, but I had never used Mathematica before. That was Wednesday night.

On Thursday, I began to explore the functionality, language, etc. and get a feel for how Mathematica views the world. Much to my surprise, it views the world similar to how I do! ;) this is great because I have a lot of little tasks and things that I'm thinkin' about that I would love to explore in a natural way. The matchup was so close to how I think that I had some decent looking things going on the first day. I have spent a bit of time modeling the behavior of shaker heads and even written a few programs to easily manipulate/visualize this. Mathematica can accomplish the same thing that took me 10 hours before in one line of code! It's awesome! It automatically maps controls to variables and dynamically updates the plot window.


Friday, dad asked me a question regarding the design of a new topper/hedger and I was inspired with an opportunity to put Mathematica to use in a relevant project. The main thing is that it gets hard to read when you start putting in numbers first (it's easier to leave it symbolic for understanding's sake). That is where this app really shines! (can you tell that I'm excited?) In probably about 8 lines of code, I generated the following set of equations (sorry if it's hard to read, the points is that I didn't have to generate all those complicated conditions on the right by hand!)

So after implmenting these equations and getting to know the plotting features, I generated this beatiful little visualization of the cuts being made by a rotary topper (assuming certain constants like ground speed, bar size, tooth pitch, saw speed, star speed, etc.)... each color is generated by a seperate instance of the above two equations. This plot represents about 64 equations -- more than I want to type by hand!

I finished this functionality by noon on Saturday, which I think is an outstanding learning curve for software so capable. Not braggin here, I am just really impressed with how easy this is to use! $45 well spent! ($45 is the student rate, the commercial version is thousands of dollars).

So here is the bottom line: I'm not a nerd. I just love beatiful things! ;)