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On behalf of all of HN, thank you for the kind and generous offer of your time and expertise. Though a lot of people excel at learning on their own, many human
by jcr 15y ago
On behalf of all of HN, thank you for the kind and generous offer of
your time and expertise. Though a lot of people excel at learning on
their own, many human beings are trained to learn better through
courses. The examples, direction and structure provided can really help.
I never bothered to take calculus in school (distant decades ago), and
never bothered to seriously study on my own (e.g. dedicated learning
working through an entire book), but I have managed to learn various,
incomplete chunks of it. In short, I just learned the parts I needed to
know at various times to do something, and admittedly, I've probably
forgot most of them. It's somewhat unfortunate to publicly admit only
remembering random, disjointed chunks of calculus (and also lambda
calculus for that matter), but I'm certain I'm not alone.
Being that you've worked as a math and physics tutor for a decade,
you've most likely seen quite a number of calculus texts being used in
courses and possess an extremely valuable opinion on the merit of
various tomes. You're possibly even familiar with on-line courses such
as MIT Open Courseware and similar.
Since there's no way you'll be able to tutor everyone, would you provide
your opinions on books and courses for the self-starters?
- dataduck 15y agoFor university level physical applied mathematics, Boas: (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematical-Methods-Physical-Sciences-Mary/dp/0471044091/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311853323&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematical-Methods-Physical-Scienc...) I'd also recommend Riley, Hobson and Bence, which has all the benefits and disadvantages of being bigger: (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematical-Methods-Physics-Engineering-Comprehensive/dp/0521679710/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311853369&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematical-Methods-Physics-Enginee...) For A-level, most students I've taught want me to follow their school course, so I've mostly taught out of an array of textbooks of varying quality. On the whole, the standard A-level course books for EdExcel, AQA, OCR and the like are adequate, but only really as part of a taught course. If I cast my mind back, Bostock and Chandler was quite good, although I suspect it will be a bit retro by now with respect to syllabus changes - it was old when I was learning this stuff for the first time. That said, mathematics is one of the more stable subjects and the fundamentals don't change very much, so I'd definitely recommend looking at it. Obviously, if you're not looking for something to pass an exam with, classic books become a lot more appealing.
- jcr 15y agoThank You.
- ColinWright 15y ago"Calculus Made Easy" by Silvanus Thompson (updated by Martin Gardner). http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Made-Easy-Silvanus-Thompson/dp/1409724670/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281003280&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Made-Easy-Silvanus-Thompson/d... (And you probably know this, but "Calculus" isn't the same as the "Lambda Calculus" - your comment makes it appear that you've confused or equated the two.)