I understand that a very sound facility in the application of calculus, is essential for higher maths; so I have been reading around the subject as much as possible, over the last 3 months, to soften the blow when I officially meet it in May 2011, as part of MST121.
To that end, I found a company online that do DVD collections of lectures on all sorts of academic subjects. The company is called 'The Teaching Company'.
PS: I don't make money if you click through and buy from them :-)
Their sales patter mentions that the lectures use 'the best of the best' lecturers, from all over the world, as chosen by past students.
These DVD's range from £19 to over £100 and can be up to 40+hrs in total content. I spent weeks pondering which one to buy, as part of my 'Zulu' approach to maths and physics. They are such a big cost commitment and time commitment, to own and watch; that I needed to be sure I would get the use out of them, rather than them just gathering dust on my shelf.
In the end, I decided to get :
Understanding Calculus: Problems, Solutions and Tips
The professor is Bruce Edwards, a bloke from Florida who likes to talk with his hands which I thought would get on my nerves; but he is actually very watch-able.
Each lecture is 30mins long and is very easy to follow and it has given me loads of confidence in being able to cope with the subject. Being American, he uses some slightly unfamiliar notation or just different letters for constants etc., such as D instead of C. It's a minor thing, but it can cause you to loose track for a moment or two, when things get tricky.
I have got to lecture 9, which is 4.5hrs of lectures (wow, I'll be a maths king at this rate)!
To give you a flavour of the subjects covered. The titles of the lectures so far, are:
A preview of calculus
Graphs, models and functions
Functions and trigonometry
Finding limits
An introduction to continuity
Infinite limits and limits at infinity
The derivative and the Tangent line problem
Basic differentiation rules
Product and quotient rules
When I look at that list, it all sounds gobbledygook, but going through the lectures in sequence, was surprisingly straight forward.
Overall, I'd recommend it, especially if you are a type of person that gets stuck just referring to a text book.
I've now bought the Cosmology lectures as well, and I'll post about those soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment