Last Sunday I took the first MAT 275 exam and was able to score 8/8 somehow. Stumbled a little bit on using Euler’s method and on a Population Dynamics problem on my first attempt, but got my mistakes corrected on the second. Still have to do better at integration techniques. Differential Equations brings together so many topics that I’ve been studying for the past year.
The homework hasn’t been too bad for 275 this past week. Week 4 we’re going to be looking at:
- Undetermined Coefficients
- Variation of Parameters
- Free Mechanical Vibrations
- Forced Mechanical Vibrations
The labs have been interesting. This past lab we took a look at Euler’s method and the Improved Euler’s method in MATLAB. It neat to be able see how that application can be used to get an approximation for a value using those two methods. Short of a stupid mistake switching a row and column in MATLAB, I’ve done well on the MAT 275 labs.
Linear Algebra hasn’t been a lot of fun this past week. I’m still really struggling to get my arms around Vector Spaces and Subspaces for some reason. The homework for those two sections took a lot of time the past week. The section on Linear Independence wasn’t as bad as the subspace section. Hopefully I can get those section sorted out soon. I’m sure we’ll see those topics on the midterm coming up in two weeks.
Week 4 has us studying:
- Basis and Dimension
- Change of Basis
- Row Space and Column Space
- Linear Transformations
While the math classes have consumed most of my time the past few weeks, I’m also an undergrad TA for EEE 120 this session. I help out on the discussion board. Hopefully I’ve helped some of the students out.
Robert J. Graves 