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Society lubricants

By Murray Bourne, 14 Oct 2005

On my mathematics website, Interactive Mathematics, I have a "Comments or Questions?" feature on every page.

Some of the questions are, well, difficult to answer:

how to work out mathematics?

Others are much clearer:

What is the degree of differential equation?
Is differential equation has unique degree or not?

But most, like the one above, are totally devoid of "please". This is a free service, after all.

Some questions take quite a while to answer. It is very rare to get a thank you in reply. Lately I have been adding the following to my answer mails. Is it too cryptic, do you think?

"Manners are the lubricant of society..."

See the 1 Comment below.

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Posted in Learning (general) category - 14 Oct 2005 [Permalink]

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One Comment on “Society lubricants”

  1. Thisain says:
    21 Aug 2010 at 11:56 pm [Comment permalink]

    Dear Mr Bourne,

    I so much want to thank you for your help

    Anyway I would like to speak for everyone when I say, even you can't imagine the value of your work Mr Bourne. Thank you for everything.

    Good day!

Leave a comment




Comment Preview

HTML: You can use simple tags like <b>, <a href="...">, etc.

To enter math, you can can either:

  1. Use simple calculator-like input in the following format (surround your math in backticks, or qq on tablet or phone):
    `a^2 = sqrt(b^2 + c^2)`
    (See more on ASCIIMath syntax); or
  2. Use simple LaTeX in the following format. Surround your math with \( and \).
    \( \int g dx = \sqrt{\frac{a}{b}} \)
    (This is standard simple LaTeX.)

NOTE: You can mix both types of math entry in your comment.

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Tips, tricks, lessons, and tutoring to help reduce test anxiety and move to the top of the class.