I agree with the hating calculus part…so glad this term marks the end of the last calc course I’ll ever take!
Physics, on the other hand, is just beautiful 
It’s amazing what taking Calc or Physics at a small school can do for you, as opposed to a University. Many large universities unfairly use the 100 level Calculus, Physics and Chemistry classes as weed-out classes, instead of focusing on better techniques of teaching the class. If you can endure the lower level classes without getting bitter and disillusioned, the upper division classes are really a wonderful experience in comparison.
I haven’t had physics yet but I’m worried it’ll be more of the same. I don’t think it’d be so bad if we had things explained to us more clearly, it just seems like we are given a vague description then told to solve problems that require a competent knowledge of the subject. A person can either pull their hair out and stare at a computer screen for an hour or they can talk to a competent mathematician for 3 minutes if they want to learn how to do a problem and sadly it seems like schools sometimes prefer teaching via the former method. Luckily I go to math lab all the time so I can get help when i’m lost, but some of those math lab people are assholes.
Luckily the class got a bit better but i’m sure that was due to a variety of factors. Maybe the professor was weeding out the weak in the first month and a half then after that he started teaching more competently. I remember talking via IM to my friend about my professor and saying nobody knew what he was talking about the first month during each lecture, which seemed to be true. However in the last month or two of class most of what he said made sense. maybe I got used to the extra workload, maybe I understood the material better, I am not sure but it got a bit better a week or two after I made my original post.
I hate being forced to learn them under threat of failure but the subjects themselves are really interesting. I like learning about integrals and derivitives and how they are used to find areas of objects. I’m sure physics will be a really interesting subject, I just hope that things are explained more clearly before we are given homework.
Well I just got back from my first Calculus II exam, and it was the easiest calculus exam i’ve ever had. I doubt I got an A though, there are too many stupid mistakes I could’ve made (I caught at least 4 or 5 stupid mistakes, but I’m sure I made 4 or 5 more). What is important though is that there was not a single problem I didn’t know how to do, or at the very least didn’t think I didn’t know how to do (they may not be the same thing).
This test just covered rotations on the x and y axis, washer and shell methods, arc lengths & finding the area of something on its axis of rotation.
What sucks is that for about 4-5 problems the professor said ‘write the integral then either calculate it by hand or do it on your calculator’ and I’m afraid I may have fucked that up.
For example, if you are doing the function (3x^2 + 4x)dx on the interval 1,3 (an easy one) I would write it as (sum sign with 1 and 3 on it) 3x^2+4x dx. However he may have wanted us to integrate it when we wrote it and I didnt, I didn’t write (sum sign with 1 and 3 on it) x^3+2x^2 dx, I wrote the pre-integrated function. I hope I don’t lose tons of points for that.
Anyway, this thread’s last reply is only a month old I don’t think bumping it is a crime, esp since it involves my changing views on calculus and physics. Right now I think calc is easy and physics is hard as hell. I don’t hate physics as much as I hated calc though, I just have alot of trouble with it.
Calc II was the easiest calc course I took, fully contrary to the experience of just about anyone I’ve spoken to. I’m glad to see I might not be alone. Physics, on the other hand … yech. I got an A in physics, but I’m not relishing the second course in the sequence.
But I’d take five upper-division physics courses over this goddamned cockwhore-ish numerical analysis. FUCK YOU, NUMERICAL ANALYSIS. Maybe it’s the teacher; maybe it’s the book; maybe it’s me, or a little bit of everything. But fuck this shit.
I keep telling people this every semester, but THIS will be the semester I fail all of my courses. Algorithms, fuck you! Digital logic, fuck your mother! Fuck YOU and then your MOTHER with the same fucking baseball bat!
Calc I was made moderately difficult only by related rates. But Calc II, I still get nightmares about sequences and series (that book sucks a big donkey dick, by the way).
Yehaw, that is my book. I have no idea what calc II will be like, I am only in the 3rd week of a 15 week class. Maybe it’ll be hell down the road I have no idea right now.
Huh. I rather liked that book; if anything it was too easy, and inadequately prepared me for the sort of thing I’m doing in my current classes whenever the sequences/series stuff comes up. That book pretty much taught me three semesters of calculus, since I rarely ever went to class.
If you want a book that sucks donkey dick, try here. Blech.
I was searching for a different thread on this board (something to do with physicians and what they can cure) when I came across this thread. I would give almost anything to go back to the days when taking calc and physics was my biggest problem in life. I miss college so much. I don’t know if that makes me pathetic that that phase of life was one of the few islands of stability in my life, but I don’t care. I miss those days when these were the worst problems I had. As I’ve gotten older my life has gotten more raw.
FWIW, I failed Calc III in 2006, and as a result had to change my major to biochemistry (which only requires 2 semesters of calculus, not 3). Graduated in 2007. FWIW, Newtonian Physics was actually kind of fun. electrophysics was hard though.
The secret of college math classes is that multivariable calculus is the hardest math class in the entire school. That includes graduate classes. Multivariable calculus is the pinnacle of difficulty that can be reached before things get so impossible to deal with that you have to prove everything rigorously, which means that right after calculus you basically start over with easy stuff again in order to prove things. Eventually you reach multivariable calculus a second time (proving it this time) but it isn’t any harder than the first time really. Maybe once you get to algebraic geometry you finally get a harder class than the original multivariable calculus.
Proof that zombies can’t count.
However, I opened this and am posting to share minutephysics.
“Simply put: cool physics and other sweet science. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” ~Rutherford via Einstein?”
These are good, complete sets of worked examples, ordered logically.
Mother@*$^@(! That’s what made me give up hard science because I got a C and decided I couldn’t handle the math!
The thing I hate most about physics is that teachers will abuse “approximately equal to” a little too much for my taste.
I can’t remember the exact question, but when I was in thermodynamics there was some question about 2-dimensional thermal expansion. The question was just a standard “prove you can set up the equation and reduce it to this expression.” Such an easy question, it’s just algebra! Not even calc!
I almost failed that test because I spent so long on that question. I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t solve it, it was so easy!
Lo and behold, since two values were always very small (more or less by definition) we were supposed to see that multiplying those two was “almost equal” to zero and cancel the term, after which the reduction from the step I got to and the final equation was trivial.
I still call bullshit on that question because I come from math-land, where “almost equal to zero” doesn’t mean shit. It’s either zero or it’s not. I can accept some things like the small angle approximation, but that’s because we’re told it’s an approximation. I can’t in good faith cancel very small terms to zero when I’m not told an approximation is okay beforehand.
@ Wesley: In Soviet Union, Calc hates you!
Oh, and a funny calc story from my Physics class. We had a question that involved the derivative of a product. 90% of the class got partial credit for realizing what they needed to do, but not being able to actually execute it because nobody could remember the quotient rule for differentiation. Seriously, it just almost never comes up.
I got it, but it was only because we only needed to prove… something, I can’t remember. It involved lenses, and I realized that due to the properties of the function and what I needed to do I could effectively prove the same thing by doing this:
f(x)/g(x)
Take the log:
log(f(x)/g(x)) = log(f(x))-log(g(x))
d/dx log(f(x)) - d/dx log(g(x))
Instead of taking the derivative of the quotient. Taking the log-derivative was a lot easier. I later learned that this was a real thing that people do all the time, gold star for me!
Why not just write f(x)/g(x) as f(x)*[g(x)]^(-1) and apply the power and product rules? I always thought the quotient rule was a silly little not-worth-memorizing thing. Like the double-angle formulas for sin and cos, once you learn Euler’s formula.
College is comforting, because there actually are right answers. Follow the procedures and the checklists, and things go right. “Real Life” is ugly and messy and there often aren’t right answers. You have to spend a lot more time trying to figure out what to do next.
(In my case, “real life” intruded on college when the advising office messed up the list of courses I needed, and I missed graduating…by one damned class. The bastards used the wrong checklist. That was my brutal introduction to the ugly, messy, screwed-up way that “real life” works. Like you, I’d love to go back! I’ve thought about taking that one missing class – but for $6,000? No.)
Assuming this was NOT the first time you had encountered that idea, then I don’t see the problem. Physics is about understanding the real world, not about being mathematically pure. If being pure doesn’t get you an answer, then what good is it?
Everything is an approximation anyway. There are not frictionless surfaces, lossless transmission wires, perfectly spherical objects, or “perfect springs”.
Don’t make me to tell you the physics joke about the spherical horse. 