The last time I took Exam P in 2009 there were sections I simply wrote off as things I didn’t feel bad not knowing. Learning to calculate Jacobian transformations would take many hours and the odds of that being a question seemed low so I simply skipped it after I found it didn’t come to me quickly. This time around, I re-attempted the topics that I had failed at or skipped before and found again them to be inscrutable. Even worse, topics I had been recently doing well on had lost their quick ease.

I did a quick calculation about the number of topics this wall applied to and what portion of the exam they made up figured that I’d need to gain competency in three of the seven to have a good chance of passing my next sitting in a little over a week. I wasn’t going to be able to dodge this one so I talked to my friend Youtube about multivariate transformations and somehow a slightly awkward guy using Sharpies on a presentation board succeeded where two teachers, two exam prep guides, and a lot of wikipedia had failed. Two to go.