most physicists have a love and hate attitude towards maths. we love it when we get it right, and we hate it when we dont. the anecdotes regarding us and maths and mathematicians are endless and entirely unfunny, except, of course to we of the befuddled thought processes.
once upon a time, back home, in the land of the true believers, one prasad sengupta, a truly talented faculty in our dept was perspiring over the solution of laplace's equation in some hideous geometry. after about two boardfuls, all of us sweating(summer in calcutta) and some of us rendered somnolent tends to comatose by the scratch of chalk and the regular click click click of the rather inadequate fan, he turned to us and proclaimed "lost in a jungle of algebra". words that i remember with laughter and some tears(laplace's equation, is, under thebest of circumstances, a beast).
so, here i am, trying to put together product operators for the last answer to a hw. and product operators have an alarming habit of inflating under each pulse or time evolution. if one keeps track of the signs and the sines and the cosines faithfully,, one will not go wrong, but then one does. and then retracing the path followed by half a page of math is approximatly as tricky as negotiating your way out of a south american temple while the wals are begining to crumble around you.
another thing that only the foolish, the masochistic and the supremely confident attempt is to solve problems for the general case, and then plug in values and get answers. i leave it to your imagination as to what i am. but the sheer joy of seeing all the terms collapse into the one ypou expect is the highest level of happiness that a mathematically challenged individual like me can ever hope to achieve. its like seeing the beast collapse; maybe it was a lucky shot, but who cares!!!!!!
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