Math 251:H1 Spring 2004


Announcements

  1. The recitation class on Tuesday, January 27 met in the InstructionalMicroLab ARC-118 instead of the scheduled location. This meeting was devoted to an introduction to the Maple Symbolic Computation program. Printed copies of the Maple Instructions and the description of Maple Lab0 will be distributed at this meeting. In this class, the seed file for the lab was obtained from the course web page, Maple was started and work on Lab0 was begun. Students were shown how to recognize common mistakes encountered in Lab0 and shown how to save work in an eden directory in order to continue working on the lab. For subsequent labs, no printed material will be distributed. Students will be responsible for printing the lab description from the file on the web site.
  2. You have approximately two weeks to complete each Maple lab assignment. Several revisions will be needed to produce an attractive report, so you should work on parts of the project whenever you have time. Lab0 is due on Tuesday, February 10. The grade on lab0 will not be used in determining grades for the course, but it will indicate the standards used in grading the other four labs.
  3. This section is enrolled in the Maple Adoption Program. Among other things, this program allows students in this section to purchase a personal copy of the student version of Maple for the reduced price of 75.00 US $ (plus applicable shipping charges and taxes). Contact the instructor if you are interested.
  4. There is more flexibility in the lectures for this course than in a large lecture section, but lectures will be close to those I gave in my 251 class in Spring 2003. A web page for that section is available. The page contains slides used in lecture. The slides require a password as part of a system to prevent printing of the slides, although the content of the slides can be printed in summaries of the material appearing on the exams. The password is "SEC117", which was derived from the room in which that class met.
  5. The first exam was held on Monday, February 16. It was based on topics listed in the Lecture Schedule through Monday, February 09. Note that exams are closed-book, with no formula sheets. However, the problems will be close to those practiced as homework and any special new formulas will be given on the exam (however, you are expected to know basic differentiation formulas from first year calculus).
  6. On Tuesday, February 17, the class will meet in the PC IML: ARC 118. This will include an exhibit of some uses of Maple, including (but not limited to) material in Lab 1.
  7. Lab 1 is due on Wednesday, February 25. The functions defined at the beginning of Lab 1 allow vectors to be represented as lists. This makes some things easy, but it requires that these functions be used for all operations, including multiplying vectors by scalars of scaling the vector r' to get the unit tangent vector T. Your computation of the quantities requested in the lab description should not necessarily be done by writing the Maple equivalent of the formulas. Common expressions can be computed separately and saved under a convenient name. Those names can then be used in later computations. Note that the absolute value notation applied to a vector is used to denote the length of the vector, and that ds/dt is another name for the length of v (and v is another name for r').
  8. On Tuesday, March 9, the class met in the PC IML: ARC 118. You will need to do most of the work on Lab 2 before this, but the work will concentrate on interpreting the graphs of surfaces.
  9. Maple Lab 2 was due on Wednesday, March 10.
  10. Exam 2 was given on Wednesday, March 24. It was based on topics listed in the Lecture Schedule assigned between Wednesday, February 18 to Monday, March 08.
  11. Maple Lab 3 was due on Wednesday, March 31.
  12. On Tuesday, April 6, the class met in the PC IML: ARC 118. Here is an expanded version of the console worksheet exported to html.
  13. Exam 3 will be given on Tuesday, April 13. It will be based on topics listed in the Lecture Schedule assigned between Monday, March 29 and Monday, April 05. The earlier discussion of Surface Area is important background, but there are no good problems on this topic, so the exam will concentrate on the flux integral of a vector field on a surface and the connection given by Stokes' theorem between line integrals on closed curves and certain flux integrals.
  14. Maple Lab 4 is due on Wednesday, April 21.
  15. Exam 4 will be given on Wednesday, April 28.
  16. The final exam for this course is scheduled according to the class hour formula (exam code C), so was held on Friday, May 7, 4 - 7 PM in Hill 124
  17. The exam has been graded, including the version taken by two students from noon to 3PM on Monday, May 10. Course grades have also been submitted electronically. Course grades will eventually be available from the University. In the meantime, the scores on the final exam and course grades can both be found in the FAS Gradebook.

Important links


Course handouts

Adobe Acrobat format. You should be able to view and print from your browser.


Homework and Workshops

The Lecture Schedule has a list of homework problems and their due dates.


Exam schedule:

There will be four exams. Because this decision was not reached until the end of the third week, there is not enough time to get two exams into the schedule before Spring Break. However, the material to be included on the first exam was completed by February 9, so that exam can be given on Monday, February 16. The current plans for the other exams are: Wednesday, March 24; Tuesday, April 13; Wednesday, April 28. Exams are planned as 60 minute exams, though usually more time is allowed. The frequent exams and multiple uses of the recitation period leave too little time for quizzes.


Maple Lab seed files.

You will need to save a copy of the seed file to open in Maple. There are several ways to get this copy: (1) click the right mouse button on the link to get a context menu and select save to disk; (2) press the shift key and click the left mouse button to get the save to disk dialog directly; (3) if your browser shows you the file as text, use the SaveAs item on the file menu to save a local copy. There is a better method, introduced in December 2002, but it requires some preparation. The math department web server now defines all files with extension mws as mime-type application/x-maple. This means that you can configure your web browser to do something useful in response to an ordinary left click on the link to such a file. In Netscape, select preferences from the edit menu, expand the Navigator submenu an select Applications. This will allow you to add this type and instruct the browser to Save to Disk. You should have started WebDrive to allow downloaded files to be saved in your eden account. (It is also possible to have the browser start xmaple, but then you will need to use the "Save As" item from the File menu in Maple to put the workshop in a useful location.)



This page changes frequently. If you don't see what you expect, use the "refresh" command of your browser to get a fresh copy. Uploads are sometimes delayed, but the aim is to get everything here when it is needed.

Comments on this page should be sent to: bumby@math.rutgers.edu
Last updated: May 11, 2004