Weblog:Never too late - Revision history

Seth at 06:07, 12 February 2009

2009-02-12T06:07:35Z

Seth at 22:13, 11 November 2008

2008-11-11T22:13:10Z

Seth at 22:11, 11 November 2008

2008-11-11T22:11:58Z

New page

I meet many people who stopped paying attention in Math, anywhere between 4th and 12th grade and, years later, got their interest piqued again. This happened to me too, and I know the feeling that it is too late. And I know that it isn't, particularly with the resources of the web. I'm posting an email I wrote to a friend. It is a post-calculus curriculum. If you made it as far as 11th grade before fading out, you can start here. You'll pick up the trig again as a result of getting back in, sort of piecemeal, the rest you can get guided through in the courses. This is more of a roadmap through MIT's OCW. everything is there: HW, tests, lectures, slides, readings (or books to buy) and answers to all the HW and tests. If you haven't made it as far as calc but want a roadmap through everything up to it, let me know and I'll put something together.

Here is the letter:

"
Lucky you, OCW not only has a complete linear algebra class, but it
has full video lectures AND it is taught by the amazing Gilbert
Strang. He is the Mr. Roger's of Linear algebra. I took Numerical
Methods with him at MIT and he started the course off talking about
his 4 favorite matrices. When I was taking linear algebra at
Berkeley, having never even heard of the guy, friends were watching
these lectures to help them understand what was going on in the local
class which was taught entirely differently.

Watching the lectures will be nice enough, but to really benefit from
this stuff, you should do the HW

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm

Here are all the math class, with all the All Class on the left sidebar.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/index.htm

It is lucky that you learned, back in the day, 'everything up to'
calculus, because there isn't really a one stop shop for full
pre-calculus courses. MIT assumes precalc and all that trig. Though
you have likely forgotten your trig and a bunch of your algebra, it
won't be prohibitive to pick up again, and you can ask me to clarify
steps, and the internet Does have all the bits and pieces scattered
about. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ is a great resource. Wolfram is
an important egomaniac who has done some cool stuff.

Given a foundation just up to calc, I prescribe the following
four-unit plan to Catching Jillian Up. The goal is to give you the
fairly conventional ladder up to taking courses with proofs. That is
when you really start seeing the beauty of mathematics, and when
equations stop having numbers in them. The first three units form a
sort of bottle neck, with intertwined prereqs, after that, you can
branch off in all kinds of directions: more applied or more abstract
or more fun. If you want to skip straight to courses with proofs, you
can do that, just let me know and I'll revise this to take out all the
courses that use numbers in their equations, though you should give
this a try. If you want a Unit 0, just to get you psyched and ease
you in, take 18.781 Theory of Numbers . Number Theory was my favorite
math.

Unit 1
18.01 Single Variable Calculus (or 18.013)
18.06 Linear Algebra

Unit 2
18.02 Multivariable Calculus
18.03 Differential Equations

Unit 3
18.05 Introduction to Probability and Statistics
18.100A Analysis I

Unit 4
pretty much whatever you'd like. Everything below is in math, but
from here you can learn Real Physics and Engineering of all kinds.
Physics tends to start as three courses: Classical Mechanics, E&M
(electricity and magnetism) and then Quantum (which MIT teaches
concurrently with statistical mechanics, which is excellent). None of
these requires all of the above prereqs, but just the process of doing
them all is great preparation for all of these, and, importantly, all
of the above are considered a minimal foundation (though I haven't
taken analysis and have never had a proper DE (Diff Eq)(differential
equations) course.
Recommendations:
18.781 Theory of Numbers (Great!!)
18.04 Complex Variables with Applications
18.100B Analysis I
18.152 Introduction to Partial Differential Equations
18.353J Nonlinear Dynamics I: Chaos
18.901 Introduction to Topology
18.950 Differential Geometry
"

← Older revision		Revision as of 06:07, 12 February 2009
Line 1:		Line 1:
−	I meet many people who stopped paying attention in Math, anywhere between 4th and 12th grade and, years later, got their interest piqued again. This happened to me too, and I know the feeling that it is too late. And I know that it isn't, particularly with the resources of the web. I'm posting an email I wrote to a friend. It is a post-calculus curriculum. If you made it as far as 11th grade before fading out, you can start here. You'll pick up the trig again as a result of getting back in, sort of piecemeal, the rest you can get guided through in the courses. This is more of a roadmap through MIT's OCW. ~~everything~~ is there: HW, tests, lectures, slides, readings (or books to buy) and answers to all the HW and tests. If you haven't made it as far as calc but want a roadmap through everything up to it, let me know and I'll put something together.	+	I meet many people who stopped paying attention in Math, anywhere between 4th and 12th grade and, years later, got their interest piqued again. This happened to me too, and I know the feeling that it is too late. And I know that it isn't, particularly with the resources of the web. I'm posting an email I wrote to a friend. It is a post-calculus curriculum. If you made it as far as 11th grade before fading out, you can start here. You'll pick up the trig again as a result of getting back in, sort of piecemeal, the rest you can get guided through in the courses. This is more of a roadmap through MIT's OCW. OCW is the complete coursework of every MIT course that is or has been taught. A great effort to make knowledge haveable. Everything is there: HW, tests, lectures, slides, readings (or books to buy) and answers to all the HW and tests. If you haven't made it as far as calc but want a roadmap through everything up to it, let me know and I'll put something together.

	Here is the letter:		Here is the letter:

@@ Line 31: / Line 31: @@
 Given a foundation just up to calc, I prescribe the following
-four-unit plan to Catching Jillian Up.  The goal is to give you the
+four-unit plan to Catching You Up.  The goal is to give you the
 fairly conventional ladder up to taking courses with proofs. That is
 when you really start seeing the beauty of mathematics, and when