[ci5er]

That's very sad - I'm sorry that happened to you.

It makes me curious about one point. It sounds as if the class you took covered what my engineering program called "Communication Theory". We were expected to have two terms of differential equations and one each of linear algebra and statistics under our belts as prerequisites. (I think. This was a long time ago...)

Were you missing, at least, having at strong basis in differential equations? If you didn't, that would have made the class double-tough.

[kbenson]

I had plenty of differential equations, but I never took linear algebra. I'm fairly certain it was introduced in one of the semesters of calculus, but IIRC there was a separate linear equations class offered. I never took statistics, but it always seemed like it was one of the more practical and useful math classes.

To be clear, my problem wasn't that there was a lot of math. My problem was that there was no context, and what we were copying off the board could easily have been copied from a book or pamphlet. I'm not sure what the practical reason is to spend multiple classes deriving one version of the FFT from another with zero context.