# mixedmath

Explorations in math and programming
David Lowry-Duda

# Math 170 Fall 2014

This is the fall 2014 Math 170 Calculus II posthead for David Lowry-Duda’s section. This is not the main site for the whole course (which can be found at https://sites.google.com/a/brown.edu/fa14-math0170/section-2), but it will contain helpful bits and is a good venue through which you can ask questions.

A few things that might interest you so far:

1. An intuitive introduction to calculus, which contains a brief overview of first semester calculus. I wrote this for students in Brown's Math 100 as a sort of review.
2. An intuitive overview of Taylor series, which tries to give a better motivated intro to Taylor series than is given in Thomas' Calculus.
3. A short note on partial fractions.

In addition, I've taught twice before at Brown, and I've looked through some data on these courses. Two trends are emerging. Firstly, there is an extremely high correlation between performance on the first midterm and the overall final grade - far larger than you would think. I interpret this to mean that these courses are cumulative and unfriendly to students who fall behind early on - so do your best to not fall behind. Secondly, students who do a poor job on their homework do a poor job overall (but students who do good on homework don't necessarily do well overall, interestingly).

You can find the data itself and my interpretations here:

What will the Concluding Remarks for Math 170 say?

And now, the administrative details (the rest can be found on the main course website).

Instructor Name: David Lowry-Duda Email address: djlowry [at] math [dot] brown.edu (although please only use email for private communication – math questions can be asked here, and others can benefit from their openness). Office hours: 10:30-11:30AM on Mondays and 3:00-4:00PM on Fridays in Kassar 018 (the basement) MRC: Free math tutoring is given at the Kassar House, room 105, each week on Monday-Thursday from 8-10pm. It's free, there are many students learning and tutors tutoring, and there's very little reason not to go. I heavily encourage you to go.

bold, italics, and plain text are allowed in comments. A reasonable subset of markdown is supported, including lists, links, and fenced code blocks. In addition, math can be formatted using $(inline math)$ or $$(your display equation)$$.