Putting Books Away

Yesterday was the last day of my teaching contract with XMUM. I rushed myself to finish whatever tasks left for me to complete my teaching portfolio (plenty of documents to prepare, more than what I was used to in my former university). In the previous semester, the coordinators for the courses I taught had took the initiative to complete the teaching portfolio themselves and saved me from all the details needed to fill up the course portfolio. This time round, I had one course that had me as the sole lecturer (hence coordinator) and for the other shared course, I had to look into parts of the teaching portfolio. Thus, my past weekdays have been really busy with me filling the teaching portfolio. At several stages, my eyes teared up, out of all the strain looking at all the numbers.

It was only on Thursday night that I was able to complete the course portfolio and got the endorsement from the Head of Department. What a relief. Many of the repetitive things (e.g. marking) become chores but these are part of what I have been paid to do. To add, me being old-fashioned, I tend to do some things manually, even if easier automated ways are available. But that is my choice of making things relatively harder but to my satisfaction.

So now, I can put these books away.

The main textbook is the one on the right (really expensive) to which we refer to a lot. The book on the left is a book of my eldest son during his BSc course; I did not quite use this since it is meant for maths students, but just took it out for reference.

The other books that I will put away are the following.

I thought of reading them to give me a sense of what mathamtical tools would be of interest to the students. I had also took out another book on econometrics by Maddala,which I did not read at all (not in the ucture). The book on the right by Takayama is more rigorous and it covers topics on equilibrium. Some might wonder why I have these books. I have always considered mathematics as a more precise language that scientists use and I had the curiosity of how maths are being used in economics. I really wanted to read Takayama's book (appropriate for research level) but now, I will have to put this off perhaps indefinitely. So before putting it back, had a quick read of the foreword and introductory pages. I was surprised that it mentioned Planck:

Commenting on Max Planck's decision not to study economics, J.M. Keynes remarked that economics involves the "amalgam of logic and intuition and wide knowledge of facts, most of which are not precise." (Takayama, p. xv)

If Planck had decided otherwise, perhaps quantum theory will only be discovered much later. To have Planck to even consider economics is perhaps not much of a surprise. Another giant of quantum theory, John von Neumann later make contributions to game theory. This is another subject which I knew very little but wished that I know something about and it extrapolates the 'continuum' in economics (a thing of interest in quantum theory). Indeed I highlighted this matter in my classes though was not really appreciated. I even mentioned in class, that when dealing with economics, one ought to think more like physicists than mathematicians as many variables carry dimensions (not pure numbers) and that there are hidden assumptions all the while that one has to be aware of. I was trying to make the class more interesting to students. In fact, I use WolframAlpha extensively to help students build intuition often not found in books. I mention this in a document of the course portfolio to show that I make extraneous efforts to help students understand. In the course that I was handling alone, the course contents had two strands in it namely the linear algebra strand (matrices) and the applied calculus strand. To a certain extent, this seems 'disconnected', but they can be made more unified if the multivariable calculus (the last part of the course) makes use of the matrix structure. However the difficulty is to find a suitable introductory textbook that approach it as such. I did mention this in the course review document and hopefully it will be helpful for future versions of the course.

Now, back to my beloved quantum stuff ....