I am emailing a link of this to everyone on the class list every Friday afternoon. If you are not receiving these emails or want to have them sent to another email address feel free to email me at jpmccarthymaths@gmail.ie and I will add you to the mailing list.

Test 1 Results

You are identified by the last four digits of your student number. Note that there are six of us in the forties. Although technically a pass, I would point out that the marking scheme was fairly generous: if you scored 44/100 things are not all well at all. You need to work harder.

We have to realise that maths is learnt linearly. This means that a lot of what we are doing in MATH6015 depends on what we did in MATH6014. In turn everything we do in MATH6040 will rely on MATH6015. Next year we study differential equations in MATH7020: what we are doing now is laying the foundations for this. If our foundations are shaky we’re in a tight spot.

Those of us who failed are in a serious spot at the moment. I will speak with you on Monday.

It is O.K. to find material difficult. It is OK to make silly mistakes. It is not OK to miss lectures, not use the tutorials and ignore the problem. Worst of all is not making the difficult mental effort to understand what we are doing. Here is Richard Feynmann, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time:

If Richard Feynmann can be confused so can all of us. The difference we can make is to persevere, try, try and try to understand what the hell we are doing. This is difficult but eventually you will get it.

Giving up is not an option.

To the people who excelled well done. You should be particularly proud if you battled this confusion and won.

I have two students who did not write their name down on the test. I have identified who the tests belong to but I can’t figure out which is which. These people can get their results on Monday.

Notes

So far we have covered up to and including the Constraint Optimisation Problems: MATH6015 Lecture Notes (with gaps). We have now finished the first part of the course and we now move onto integration.

Also I don’t know why I didn’t advise this earlier — you would be well worth investing in a ring binder (to be kept at home or whatever) for your notes. You can see already the amount of sheets. You should be organised with these and only bring the ones we are working on to class.

Next Week

On Monday we will have a tutorial where we will try and tie up as many differentiation loose ends as possible, particularly max/min & optimisation problems.

In the rest of the week we shall start our study of integration.

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