"Actually, it's more fun for everyone if we screw up at least once in performance" - Arthur P. Mattuck, in an email to Matthew D. Roitstein, 11/13/02

"The little solution has been so unfortunate as to wander inside the corrdidor" - Mattuck, 2/5/03

"Don't be late, that means you, sweet pea" - guys with sunglasses and suits, to Mattuck, 18.03 lecture 2/7/03

"It's wrong, but kind of close" - Mattuck, 2/7/03

"...and the solution blows up!" - Mattuck, 2/7/03

"Grr" - Mattuck, 2/7/03

"We don't need an arbitrary constant in u since one u is hard enough" - Mattuck, 2/10/03

"I find that God watches over you" (with regards to ignoring absolute value signs in ln x) - Mattuck, 2/10/03

"It is quite clear that the little boat is running drugs" - Mattuck, 2/12/03

"All you have to do is remember how to spell 'Bernoulli'" - Mattuck, 2/12/03

"How about these points that separate the sheep from the goats?" - Mattuck on critical points, 2/14/03

"I'm tired of pink!" - Mattuck, 2/14/03

"I angered the MIT gods" - Mattuck, 2/14/03

"He must've been very pleased on the day that he saw this" - Mattuck, on Euler's discovering that e^ix = (cos x + i sin x), 2/19/03

"If you want to know what beautiful and elegant is, that's beautiful and elegant. Anybody want to fight?" - Mattuck, on the proof that e^ix = (cos x + i sin x), 2/19/03

"Will the correct steady-state solution please stand up?" - Mattuck, 2/21/03

"Our pretty green vector..." - Mattuck, 2/24/03

"In case you were wondering, this is why you were taught the quadratic equation in high school" - Mattuck, on solving the characteristic equation for second order ODEs, 2/28/03

"I'm going to do it with colored chalk so you all won't be able to take notes" - Mattuck, 03/03/03

"The times call for less numbers and more letters" - Mattuck, 03/03/03

"Or I push it with a long stick at odd moments" - Mattuck, on forces given to a mass attached to a spring, 3/7/03

"If you don't get it now you can get it next week but get it by the end of the term" - Mattuck, 3/7/03

"It's no better in german is that's any consolation" - Mattuck, 3/7/03

"Purple for equations, green for - I don't know what. Orange for rules" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"No space - which means less than half the board" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"I'm wasting a lot of chalk, but that's ok because chalk is cheap" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"There's room for one real number and one imaginary number - that's all" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"We separate the sheep from the goats as we approach D^2" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"Here's a great formula - it's orange worthy" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"If I'd stuck with alpha, I'd have to use another Greek letter and I think one is your maximum" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"Every formula, I have to ask, is this worthy of salmon?" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"It's this... which you don't recognize because it's not in purple" - Mattuck, 3/10/03

"I claimed they were the most important though I didn't expect you to believe me" - Mattuck, Pi Day 2003

"...which is another reason why people love linear equations" - Mattuck, Pi Day 2003

"The paradox better be seeming or I'm out of a job. Mathematics has a contradiction is it? No..." - Mattuck, Pi Day 2003

"...and this is what I was tring to prove, in case you forgot" - Mattuck, Pi Day 2003

"Heaven help you if you forget to divide by 2" - Mattuck, Pi Day 2003

"...and that makes people extremely happy because the can't remember to divide by 2(pi)" - Mattuck, Pi Day 2003

Meanwhile, here is an Ode to Spring, which arrives on Thursday: mx" + kx = 0.
If it turns out to be a damp Spring, input some nice Tea: mx" + cx' + kx = t
- Mattuck, in an email to 18.03, 3/17/03

"Now comes the moment of truth where you have to do the integral..." - Mattuck, 3/17/03

"Therefore, the ear must be doing Fourier Analysis... The question is, 'is the ear integrating something?'" - Mattuck, 3/19/03

"I'm going to do like the electrical engineers do and put in the silly vertical lines" - Mattuck, 3/19/03

"Curses! It's neither even nor odd... that means I'm going to have to calculate all of the damn coefficients" - Mattuck, 3/19/03

"It confuses me the least, but of course I'm extremely smart" - Mattuck, 3/19/03

"Of course you can tell it's not right, otherwise I wouldn't be asking" - Mattuck, 3/21/03

"Gold stars are not mine to give" - Mattuck, 3/21/03

"I didn't have any trouble with it" - Mattuck, in response to complaints that the test was too long, 4/7/03

"Anyone who is smart enough to be interested in the answer to the question is smart enough to figure it out" - Mattuck, 4/7/03

"You don't know the formula yet. It's a secret weapon only I know" - Mattuck, 4/7/03

"How many of you forgot that? I won't even bother asking..." - Mattuck, 4/7/03

"Chickens... baby chicks, that makes them sound cuter... Little baby chickens grow linearly... after a while they taper off" - Mattuck, 4/7/03

"You had to use the formula at 2 am this morning ... so maybe you do remember it" - Mattuck, 4/11/03

(on a day that a pset was due) "I'm not entirely responsible for anything I say" - Mattuck, 4/11/03

"It's undamped because I declare it to be" - Mattuck, 4/11/03

"The only reason for dropping an egg into an ice bath is so you can have a homogenous differential equation to solve" - Mattuck, 4/14/03

"That's the law of the conservation of mathematical difficulty" - Mattuck, 4/14/03

"It's very hard in mathematics to get away with anything. It happens every once in a while and then everybody cheers" - Mattuck, 4/14/03

"I haven't figured out the color coding yet for this lecture" - Mattuck, 4/16/03

"I can't change the 1's into zeros to make the calculation easier. At least in front of you I can't." - Mattuck, 4/18/03

"It violates the eigenvectors with disabilities act" - Mattuck, on using "defective" rather than "incomplete" to describe eigenvalues, 4/18/03

"I won't explain to you what I'm doing. I'll just do it and hope you all understand." - Mattuck, 4/18/03

"Because I teach differential equations, everyone thinks mistakenly that I know all about them" - Mattuck, 4/18/03

"Grammar's already hopeless!" - Mattuck, 4/18/03

"It's very well done in the notes because I wrote them myself" - Mattuck, 4/23/03

"I'm just going to make marks on the board and trust that you've done this enough that you know what this means" - Mattuck, 4/23/03

"For here I have to rely on culture that you may or may not possess" - Mattuck, 4/28/03

"If you don't know what I'm talking about, it makes no difference" - Mattuck, 4/30/03

"Two greek letters... I told you this was going to be hard!" - Mattuck, 5/5/03

"Now I'm just going to make marks on the board the way you did on your exam" - Mattuck, 5/5/03

"If you peek at the book, it's your own funeral" - Mattuck, 5/5/03