My new self-aggrandizing project (math nerds take note!)

I decided to relearn everything I forgot about Calculus since college and high school, with the goal of being able to eventually learn some more advanced stuff like differential equations and whatnot. So I started a blog to chronicle my adventures. (Three lengthy posts so far. w00t.)

My idea is to write about both relearning the math, as well as recollect on what did and did not work during my math education. (Hint: A lot of what didn’t work was the result of my laziness. But I also had some crappy teachers here and there. And some truly excellent ones.)

So that’s it. Be sure to tell all your friends.

I’m kind of doing the same thing, but I’m paying someone to teach me! I’ve gone back to school for an engineering degree, after 3 years of working following the completion of a BSc. I hadn’t done Calculus since my first year of Cegep, which was the 1998-1999 school year! Initially, the school advisor was telling me I needed to enroll in Intermediate Calculus, but I couldn’t remember even the most basic stuff! So I’m taking the equivalent of Cal I and II (single variable) AND Cal III/Intermediate (multivariable) in 2 courses rather than 3. So far it’s going well.

Turns out I remember more than I thought I did, and so a good deal of these classes is review. The new material is presented on a much more solid foundation than it would have been had I gone straight to Intermediate, and even had I done Intermediate in Cegep, I know I wouldn’t have understood nearly as much. Wanting to learn something makes so much of a difference!

This semester I’m also taking Ordinary Differential Equations, which (other than those horrid Laplace Transforms) is much easier than I imagined they could be! If you know the Quadratic Equation, you’re good to go! On the wall of the classroom, though, someone scribbled “Fuck PDE’s”, so I’m a little apprehensive of partials next term, but we’ll see. Advanced Cal is also reputed to be a horrible class, but I think that’s as much because of the prof as anything else.

Random observations about my experience:

I prefer integrals to derivatives.
I can’t EVER remember the trig identities when I need them, and I never remember what value cos(pi/4) has (or whatever).
My brain desperately wants sqrt(a+b) to be equal to sqrt(a)+sqrt(b) and it gets mad at me when I have to remind it that it doesn’t.
When presented with ln(x) and 1/x I have to think long and hard about which is the derivative and which is the anti-derivative, because we see them so bloody often in both directions that I get confused.
I really LOVE saying “Wronskian”, and don’t dislike solving it, but I always forget the negative sign in Abel’s Theorem.
My ODE prof is British, and thanks to him I say “dash” instead of “prime” when doing ODEs, but not when doing my other Calculus homework.

Overall, it’s been fun so far, and I really never thought I’d say that about math!

I remember that I could never remember them, either. Fortunately, we were allowed to use our notes on tests and so I could look them up when I needed them.

Apparently, my calculus book doesn’t bother with exponential functions (ln x, e[sup]x[/sup]) until much later. I always had tremendous difficulty with logarithms in school, only understanding them in a purely mechanical sense. My dad suggested I use a sliderule. Like I would take advice from a guy who still uses fountain pens.

Kewl! As someone who teaches Calculus (and other math) for a living, I’ll be reading eagerly, and maybe even commenting occasionally.

I (and 99% of the Canadian student population) have Stewart’s book as well. I have the big, fat, heavy Early Transcendentals version from 1998 or so. I actually think it’s a pretty good book.

For some reason, the course I’m taking now had students buy Edwards & Penney, but I didn’t care to spend money on it (or on most textbooks, actually!), and I’m a little disturbed by the fact that when I look in Stewart on a topic, the exact same examples show up (the prof takes them straight from the book)! I mean, literally; not just generics structured similarly, but with the exact same coefficients and everything! I don’t know who wrote their book first, but someone ought to look into suing the other! How hard would it be to change an example from y= 2x+4 to y = 3x+5 or whatever?!?!

Interesting. I’ll be following along. I recently posted a list of books that I think make up a more or less complete undergraduate education in math, in case you’re looking for something else to read.

Great list, ultrafilter. I’ll definitely be consulting it along the way, although I’ve got a lot of calculus and trig to refresh first.

I’m ashamed to admit that up until a couple months ago I thought “linear algebra” was the simple algebra of first-order polynomials that I learned in middle school. You know, because the equations make straight lines.

Being a computer nerd, a couple years ago I started studying functional programming, mostly with Dominus’ excellent Higher Order Perl and a couple books on Haskell. So I want to try learning some lambda calculus as well.

This is turning into an ambitious project, indeed. Writing the blog, I think, will definitely keep me motivated to get at least some work done each week. I don’t want to let down my vast audience. :stuck_out_tongue:

If you want lambda calculus, check out Benjamin Pierce’s Types and Programming Languages. The first 19 chapters cover the basics and are pretty accessible, although you’ll want to have a background in logic before you start.