Data Management Was Actually Useful
For the longest time, staring at the second question on the problem set, all I could think of was that n(n-1)/2 is the way to sum a series of numbers. I decided to take a break and ask my cat, Schroeder what he thought of it. Schroeder’s area of expertise seems more geared to making me forget about work altogether however.
I came back to the problem this morning and thought about the pairs. The order didn’t matter, and that sounds a lot like n choose 2. It’s more or less given that n choose 2 is the number of pairs possible and from there I was able to muddle through the rest of it, proving the (n+1)th case.
Two things surprised me. First, I actually did work before nine in the morning. I suppose a sidenote to that would be correctly and not out of desperation, but second, that I had retained and am still using bits of Data Management, “the useless highschool math course”.
