Well I intended to make a post every day but that quite evidently has not happened. Not because my life is boring. Oh no, I’m actually fairly busy, but I am pretty lazy too. Whatever, I’m posting now so who cares?

I’ve just finished learning about the Laplace transform which I have decided is a large mathematical bodge. Basically if a linear differential equation is difficult to solve in the time domain, just use Laplace to chuck it in the frequency domain because it’s easier than battling through the classical method. Ah well, I shouldn’t complain really, I do like things simple.

I do think it’s funny that zero can be used to simplify some mathematical problems though. Suppose we need to solve the following integral.

Basic Integral

Now that might take a bit of work because the numerator is not a derivative of the denominator. But we can embrace the power of nothing because 1 – 1 = 0 right? So lets bang that into the integral and see what happens:

'Transformed' Integral

Ah now there we go, two simple things we can solve. This is a pretty poor example because it has nothing to do with the Laplace transform but my point remains. Whatever it was.