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Welcome to the News page!
This isn't real news, more like abdaal news, longer form notes.
In these articles you can expect to see me talk about things that I have just been on my mind. You should know though that I don't put much research into these.
Have fun reading!
Thursday January 8, 2026 16:58 EST
Thinking of clever solutions
Now that I've been back in school for a bit, we've finally started covering some content again. We're beginning to solve linear differential equations in my calculus class when something interesting happened.
The prof was showed us a certain DE (differential equation) that we couldn't solve yet and was taking us through the solution. It was one of those symbolic ones that doesn't use any numeric values, she was leading up to a theorem or something. There was a moment where we appeared stuck, but then she made a random assumption out of nowhere that the form of the solution should look some way (it was a valid assumption though). WIth that assumption, she kinda attacked the question in a different way that made a ton of terms cancel out using a concept we learned earlier in the same class and was able to arrive at an answer.
It wasn't anything crazy hard, nobody in the class had any questions and people seemed to be following along just fine but the solution seemed so brilliant to me. Like who woulda thought to make that exact assumption? How would they know it would work?
The interesting thing I was talking about before happened now, where I felt kinda bummed out. If I couldn't think of this on my own how could I be able to create my own clever solutions when I encounter a problem I've never seen before? What if someone else can and they deservedly get some kinda positive thing from it over me? I don't think I've ever really made any really clever solutions before so I have no evidence to answer these questions. This same kinda feeling has happened so many times since I entered university but I don't really know what to do about it. Like how do you train someone to think outside the box like that? Maybe its genetic?
I think I'm pretty good at understanding how existing systems work, and I have evidence to justify this thought. But thinking of a new system, a clever one that solves all the requirements of a problem and is efficient seems so difficult to me.
I wanna get better at this. It would be so cool to be able to create clever solutions to problems, solutions that follow the same pattern as other clever solutions where they usually use existing tools from math and stuff.
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