My vote goes for you can do it - IF you put in a lot of time practicing. I am not unfamiliar to the slack-and-cram school of study, I taught myself 3rd semester multivariable calc in the 4 days before the final but it took 12 hours a day doing practice problems. Get a Schaum’s study guide or something similar and do every problem in it. A month is a lot of time even if you’re starting with the basics.
Obviously, if you got an A, you didn’t let your fear of math defeat you. Looking back at what I wrote, it looks like I meant that you, personally, did. That was wrong of me.
In the case of students with math anxiety, I’m not frustrated at them but at myself, for my inability to get through to them, and at their anxiety or other “baggage” that prevents them from doing as well as they otherwise could (and from your “which I do not like at all,” it sounds like you’re frustrated about it too). I want all my students to do well, and anything that keeps them from doing well is, in some sense, a source of frustration.
And I would welcome any suggestions on how to get them to like math or, if that’s not possible, to work around their dislike of math so that they can learn what they have to learn and pass the classes they have to pass.
I’m still not convinced you really need to learn all the topics listed in the OP in order to get into the course you need to take. If it’s designed for people with non-math-related majors, it shouldn’t require a pre-req that is for math-related majors. I’m thinking you might save yourself some trouble if you talked with someone who teaches the course you need to take, and find out what you really need to know in order to place into it.
I put in the work and do well when I have to, but if I can avoid it altogether, I will. (While I think that on the whole knowing more math is a good thing, honestly, I’m 36 and so far in life I haven’t needed to know more math than I already do on more than a very few occasions–at which times it’s been a fairly simple thing to look up what I need to know. I know there are lines of work and hobbies and so on where people would need to know lots more math, but I personally haven’t experienced the whole “you will need to know and use all of this algebra as an adult on a daily basis! Really!” that I heard all the time growing up.)
Cisco, when you say you tested out of all your HS math requirements, does that mean you didn’t take geometry? If so you will have problems with college algebra.
I struggled with math through high school. I had to take Algebra I twice, but I did a little better in geometry. Some years later, I came across my father’s old college algebra textbook. It was an old, frighteningly small yet thick book–frightening because I could see there would be few helpful diagrams, and even more frightening because every page seemed to crowded with equations.
But when I looked into it, I found that a lot of it was actually fun and interesting. At least as presented in this book, college algebra is a little like geometry. It isn’t just remembering rules and formulas, but also understanding how the formulas are justified. In other words, proving them. You begin to actually understand why tricks you learned in arithmetic actually work–for instance, why it is that if all the digits of a number add up to 9, then the number is divisible by 9.’’
The book also covered simultaneous equations in depth, which is something you probably will need to study if you ever want to take the GRE.
Yeah, it’s been awhile, but IIRC I completed Algebra I and then tested out of 2 lower maths to fulfill my 3 math requirements.
I give up. Why?
Because it’s easy to remember, and God was feeling kind on the day he invented 9. Also on the day he invented 10 and 11. Which are all next to each other, so it may have been the same day.
That also applies to the number 3, since 3 can go into 9. And it’s similar for 6…it they add up and can be divided by 3, and it’s even, it’s divisible by 6.
Seven is a bitch, though. AFAIK, there’s no neat little trick to determine if a multiple-digit number is divisible by seven…you just gotta go for it. Which I don’t find that odd, cause I’m one of those people that likes long division. I love dropping down that little remainder digit to make a new number to divide into.
I hate higher math, though. Which sucks, because everyone expects engineers to use all sorts of differential, multi-variable calculus. Jerks. :mad:
I skated through all of high school math until I got to AP Calculus. It was all too easy until suddenly it got hard - you had to do the work and stuff! And I hadn’t paid attention and didn’t have the underpinnings. Would you believe I made a 5 on the AP exam and never learned how to factor? I faked it the whole time, worked around it, trial and error on the calculator, that sort of thing, plus you get credit for the process. Do you have any idea how much easier calculus would have been if I would have understood algebra? Any? (Or just gone at lunch to the teacher and asked her?)
Of course, I have never, ever, ever, in actual life, used anything past simple geometry/trig.
There are a couple ways to see it, as often is the case, but here’s one that’s in the style of “college algebra”:
Consider an arbitrary polynomial Q(x) = A + Bx + Cx^2 + Dx^3 + … . Taking advantage of the fact that A = Q(0), we can rewrite this as Q(x) = Q(0) + x*(B + Cx + Dx^2 + …). Since Q(x) and Q(0) differ by a multiple of x, we see that Q(x) is divisible by x if and only if Q(0) is.
Now, take a number in decimal representation [e.g., 2356]. This is essentially short-hand for some polynomial P(x) evaluated at 10 [with our example, let P(x) = 2x^3 + 3x^2 + 5x + 6; the number we wrote is then P(10)]. We can readily shift this into a polynomial Q(x) = P(x+1) evaluated at 9 instead. Now, using the result from above, we see that 9 divides Q(9) [our original number] if and only if 9 divides Q(0) [= P(1) = the sum of the digits of our original number], establishing our desired result.
Uh-huh, uh-huh
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, go ahead, I follow
You lost me.
If you’ve a couple weeks and the inclination (and the time), you’ll amazed at what you can accomplish. Find a good text that covers all the material you need. Read through it once, closely, but don’t get bogged down in trying to work out every method and ‘get’ every skill. You’re not skimming; you’re reading for overall comprehension and context of the larger picture. For example, in the first read-through, don’t get caught up in actually taking derivatives, just get a sense of what they are. When you get to second and third derivatives, it’ll help understand what they’re doing on a conceptual level.
The second read through should be closer (or very close, if you only have time to make it through twice), but again, don’t get tied up in mastering any particular section as much of it will repeat itself and reinforce the skills as you go along. Practice taking a bunch of derivatives, but as many texts’ problem sets go from easy to difficult, do as many as it takes to get just to the can’t-quite-do-it area. Push yourself a bit when you get to those, but don’t slog through as if you’re on a dare or something.
By the time you get to the third read, you’ll be in a much better position to tackle the harder areas and concepts. Given the timeframe, pacing is important, but you’ll know which areas you can breeze through and which need focus. At the end, you won’t necessarily be able to compete in Mathlab or whatnot, but you’ll have a fairly solid grounding in the topic.
I’m not completely talking out my ass here—this is also another “you can do it!/nontraditional student” post here.
I was a high school dropout, with a rudimentary understanding of algebra at best. I got inspired, got a diploma, put in a couple years at a community college and eventually transferred to Columbia. One of my majors was economics, not quite a math-less field, and I minored in environmental science, another discipline not known for its light use of mathematics. I’d never been exposed to a derivative before, and there I was in the opening week taking notes on the concept. I survived by becoming a regular at office hours, haunting the math lab, and getting to know which concepts I’d need to learn ahead of time. The worst/best experience was a class in quantum mechanics (linear algebra? Arrays?), but I fortunately had a fantastic professor whose door was always open.
As I never wanted to let on my lack of background to other students or slow the class down, I was able to get competent in a lot of material in short spaces of time. Since the material generally built on itself, it was a constant mix of learn-for-next-section/master the old. I noticed a pattern in that after the first third of a semester passed, I was generally able to start helping out other students. Not that I was Mr. Smartypants, but since many of them hadn’t taken, say, AP calculus since high school, their relative fogginess compared to my just-learned-ness (and specific insights from office hours) dovetailed nicely.
Good luck!!!
Rhythm
Here’s a trick, if not quite as neat:
Split your decimal representation into digit-triplets starting from the right (thus, 23256881632 would split into 023 256 881 632). Now, alternately add and subtract these; the result will be divisible by 7 if and only if the original number was.
[Proof: similar to above. For polynomials P and Q, as was shown before, P(Q(c)) is divisible by c if and only if P(Q(0)) is; the decimal representation induces a P such that P(1000) = your number, and you can take Q(x) = 143*x - 1 with c = 7.]
Sorry; but, as an application of college algebra to the task, you can see how some comfort with polynomials could be useful. Perhaps in a month, they won’t faze you so anymore.
I like your way of showing it! I worked it out myself once, but I had two supporting lemmas and the whole thing took nearly two pages. Like I said, I’m not that good at math but I find some aspects of it interesting.
What does the little hat mean?
Superscript. I’m not sure if that tag works here… let me try… x[sup]2[/sup]
Ok yes it does. So x^2 is the same as x[sup]2[/sup] it’s just a way of writing it without using any markup tags.
Next, let’s show the OP how to prove the volume of a sphere.
d&r…
Everything made sense to me except this bit. Apparently it’s been too long (12 years) since my last higher level math class (Calc I in college). And I’ve always considered myself to be good at math. 
Explain, please?
Sure; my wording there was kind of clumsy. What I was saying was that you take the polynomial P with variable x, and you generate from it a new polynomial Q by replacing all the instances of x with x+1 instead. So, with our particular example of P(x) = 2x^3 + 3x^2 + 5x + 6, we would have that Q(x) = 2(x+1)^3 + 3(x+1)^2 + 5(x+1) + 6 [which can be expanded/"FOIL"ed out, but there’s no need to do so].
Clearly, this construction causes Q(0) to equal P(1), Q(3) to equal P(4), etc. In particular, Q(9) will equal P(10), which is the number we originally wrote in decimal.
Did that help?