FunWiki: ProfessorBright

As the saying goes, "Bright isn't. Dym is." (I would have to disagree with at least one part of that statement. -MarkEphair)

I've heard it as "Dym is; Bright isn't.", which is at least slightly interesting insofar as the order *might* make a difference.

Reads Shakespeare's play about King Henry (so specific... well they all sound alike to me) and applies it to BigStems during class. France is discrete; England is continuous.

Ask him about his good friend George, who was completely controlled by Carel until one day Carel made a mistake. George died while trying to pick up a fork ("I think it was to cut pizza" --ProfessorBright). Unfortunately, the fork was in the next room.

Quotes:

"The 2nd law of thermodynamics is something every educated person should feel happy with."

"Astrologers, fortune tellers, economists, Alan Greenspan--- they're all non-causal systems."

"A non-causal system means you put in an impulse today and the output started yesterday. There's nothing to stop you from storing future data. It's called digital signal processing and you make lots of money doing it."

   Prof Bright: "How would you build this filter?"
   MichaelVrable: "Like everything else in this course, it's ideal and doesn't exist, so you can't."
   Prof Bright: "That's exactly right. You can't. Good answer."

"Cosines don't exist."

"He's an engineer. Find the best engine first. And a basic law of nature? A bonus."

"It may have been a bit of snobbery: mathematicians couldn't recognize that an engineer could take DEs and turn them into algebra, and so they called it the Laplace transform."

"Don't say Heaviside. Say Laplace. Except in the company of engineers."

"You have to forgive my predjudice here; he's an English engineer." --ProfessorBright on Heaviside, after he consistently kept calling it the Heaviside transform while telling us to call it the Laplace transform.

"It comes together and goes WHEEEEEE!"

"Did anyone design a controller? [dead silence from the class] No one? I'm disappointed. This is one of the hardest control problems there are. I'll show you how to solve it after the break. You don't use these methods we've been using in class, by the way-- you have to use entirely different methods."

(I actually managed to do the inverted pendulum classically, for about a gagillion extra credit points. It was hard. -AlexUtter)

"Unfortunately it was a concrete firewall-- and George died."

"But as long as George lives on in my memory...he will live on in big stems."

"I was very close to 1.5. Eventually I just gave up." --ProfessorBright, on fiddling with state space matrices to get the rise time within spec.

"It's kind of your worst nightmare, really. It's got everything in it...about 5 chapters of OWN in that one formula."

"A report 10 pages long would be a bit excessive. So, your report should be...10 pages."

Category ClaremontProfessors