About 'Dimensional Analysis Primer'!

  • What is dimensional analysis?
  • Why would you care?
  • How to use it
  • Some worked examples.

(Unique Video Reference: 16b_CC_RPG)

We would love to know…

  • What you found good about this lecture?
  • What we could do better?

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hi ben can you help me with this

Hi Jan.

@DanM would you mind taking a look, this ended-up in the wrong sub-forum.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really liking the course so far, but the general summation of my reaction to this lecture was “…wut?” Just picture that meme with the dinosaur scratching his chin and you get the idea.
Honestly it completely lost me the moment it started with the -1 superscript on top of miles per hour. My head just started spinning and everything after that went right over it.

(It probably doesn’t help that in college, I was one of those computer science students who aced all the front end programming courses and bombed anything that depended on a lot of math like Algorithms and Automata)

I guess my foremost question is “Why do I need this?”

3 Likes

Ben said that something like -273 Kelvin degree exists in our world. Actually 0 Kelvin is the lowest possible temperature. So he probably meant -273 Celsius.

Dimensional analysis is super powerful, but explained without pen and paper while trying to do it on one line in a comment is super difficult even for me and I know how to do it already. I suggest using a tablet to sketch it out for the class, and encourage students to do it with pen and paper to find the equations they need before they get to putting it into code. It is very hard to see how units cancel in a single line comment.

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