Memoryless Systems and my experiences with QM

Oh My God!

We had a Quantitative methods class today... the prof was talking about exponential distributions and some illustrations of the same. Ooof! Are they ever hard to understand! All the theory he taught seemed to make sense...then Kabooom! He thrust some seemingly "simple" problem on us.
That effectively destroyed whatever confidence I had in the subject. It was Overhead transmission pure and simple... I could hear the whooshing sound of all that gyaan passing right out of my brain.

Eeek! If a CA like me (who has had a prior exposure to Probability and distributions) can resist QM like a bucking bronco, I can well imagine what it is to have a non-maths background. It must be like a rustic Greek being caught in a Tamil Nadu village.

There was this concept of memory-less property of exponential distributions being taught in class. Memory less... Memory less... Memory less... What was actually taught ? Oh..I feel my memory is getting progressively lesser. ;-). I thought of me having a good head for data...Facts, figures, trivia - everything was right up my street, or so I thought. But this has been a rude awakening. The way things are taught here are a lot more about concepts than mere facts. Abstracting the concept from the data is extremely important...Thankfully, I have a set of very helpful friends who can make sense of the distributions, probabilities and stuff.

Actually it was not as bad as I paint it to be, once I get some help... God bless the IITs(and the other Quant focussed colleges) and Thank God for the Mathematicians of the batch! And God bless their helpful hearts! After the event I actually feel that Quant is not such a tough subject after all. All it requires is some acquaintance, a helluva lot of practice and some common sense. As future Managers, all of us will be required to use/interpret large quantities of data and this is a useful way to make sense of it all...

That's enuf for now....
Sitan