Jimmy Carter issues statement on Snowden. "America no longer has a functioning democracy"

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254. It is interesting that you bring up dynamical systems....

I was looking at some review papers on caustics a few weeks ago to see if there would be any way to use them to model the dripping of a droplet from a surface. Who knows if that approach would yield anything useful or interesting? (It has probably been done already, though.) Just for fun, here is a link to some interesting papers - including one on the reflections from a X-mas ornament:

http://www.phy.bristol.ac.uk/people/berry_mv/publications.html

Also, I don't know if you heard that V.I. Arnol'd passed away in 2010. That is a while back, but it is notable since he wrote so many good books. Here is one that you might enjoy - it is not full-on mathematics, but it is a short historical discussion of Huygens, Barrow, Newton and Hooke - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0817623833 .

FYI:

The engineering college that I mentioned is a school unto itself in Indiana. My experience is that engineering gives math an even shorter schrift (so to speak) than physics gives math. So, their curriculum that omits vector calculus (say, Marsden) and linear algebra makes sense if one wants to get right to engineering applications and engineering coursework, but disadvantages those who would like to truly understand what is being said. A discussion of mathematical pedagogy is long, though, so I'll omit it with one exception - Arnol'd had an interesting view on how math should be taught and understood:

http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html

It sounds like what you are presently doing is very important and demanding work. I hope that it is going well for you, but it must be difficult. Political science would have been a useful major.

Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson is problematic, but in an early letter that he wrote to one of his relatives (I believe), he recommended that the relative go into law so that he could take a role that would provide public service - i.e., in Jefferson's opinion, if a person wanted to influence the world, a law degree was the first step. At the moment, I cannot find a link to the letter to which I referred - sorry. In lieu of that, here is a link to an interesting collection of his writings:

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefLett.html

Sadly, at this point, I am writing more of a epic-length novel than a reply to a post, so I will break it off. Good luck with your work and, in case no one ever openly stated it - you make DU a better community with your postings.