In 1992 I was in my final year of secondary school and got into a science extension program which paired students with industry.
Somehow or other I ended up with a guy from DSTO (Australia's publicly funded defence arm), and he thought it would be a good idea for me to test the results of underwater acoustic transmissions against some results they had (he didn't tell me why this was needed, but it was pretty obvious..)
Anyway, he was a Fortran programmer who used a VAX. My family had a Mac Plus with Hypercard. He gave me "Numerical Recipes in Fortran"[1] and I ended up implementing Newton's method[1] in Hypercard. After that I felt I really understood calculus...
In 1992 I was in my final year of secondary school and got into a science extension program which paired students with industry.
Somehow or other I ended up with a guy from DSTO (Australia's publicly funded defence arm), and he thought it would be a good idea for me to test the results of underwater acoustic transmissions against some results they had (he didn't tell me why this was needed, but it was pretty obvious..)
Anyway, he was a Fortran programmer who used a VAX. My family had a Mac Plus with Hypercard. He gave me "Numerical Recipes in Fortran"[1] and I ended up implementing Newton's method[1] in Hypercard. After that I felt I really understood calculus...
[1] http://www.haoli.org/nr/bookf.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtons_method