Getting Math Chops Back Up
Posted by
Martin C. Martin on
Oct 10, 2005; 12:15am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Getting-Math-Chops-Back-Up-tp520638p520642.html
Frank Wimberly wrote:
> I should just say, "What she (Cheryl) said..."
>
> I had sent the following to Owen "offline" but I was encouraged to send it
> to the list:
>
> "Owen,
>
> I have a lot to say about this. In particular, there is this difference
> between applied (or applicable) mathematics and "pure" mathematics.
> Mathematics departments tend to emphasize the latter. After my sophomore
> year at Berkeley the only thing we did in math courses was to learn to prove
> theorems. Our former classmates in Calculus 1-4 who were physics majors,
> for example, took "advanced calculus for science and engineering" while we
> math majors took "introductory real analysis". They learned differential
> equations and we learned the Heine-Borel theorem. They learned about
> matrices and linear transformations; we learned about groups, rings and
> fields. When we asked, "When are we going to learn about the stuff the
> physicists are learning?" we were told, "If you learn this stuff you can
> always learn that stuff."
>
> Maybe this was just characteristic of that time and place (Berkeley, 1960's)
> but I doubt it.
It was my experience at the University of Toronto in the 1990. I took
the math route, and learned real analysis and Heine-Borel, while my
physics friends learned ODEs and linear algebra.
If you're interested in freshman real analysis, a great book is Calculus
by Michael Spivak. It even gets 4 1/2 stars at amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0914098896No table of derivatives; lots of epsilon-delta.
- Martin