- #1
Dr. Seafood
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Does your school's math curriculum "satisfy" you?
How much rigor is in your math courses? My school has a distinct math faculty (our math program is through the math faculty, not through sciences) with a variety of math majors: combinatorics, statistics, pure math, applied math, computation, etc. Even with such a distinguished name, the math classes are jokes. They're example- and algorithm-based. We're usually provided with a general problem and then an algorithm for solving it without much rigor. Proofs aren't on the exams at all.
That said, there are advanced level courses of all first and second year core math classes. These include: Calculus I, II, III, Intro to algebra, Linear Algebra I, II, Intro to combinatorics, Intro to probability, Intro to statistics. After these, the pure math classes are pretty proof heavy -- real analysis, rings/fields/groups, geometry, graph theory, etc. I'm currently taking calculus III, linear algebra II and intro to combinatorics at the advanced level and it's pretty proof-heavy. Calculus III is epsilon-delta all over the place, lin alg II is pretty much a rings and polynomials course, and combinatorics is about bijections and power series. In calculus we've already discussed open and closed sets, compactness, uniform continuity.
The standard versions of these courses are completely different. Calculus III is about how to find partial derivatives of any function, and the idea of "limit" is reduced to algebraic tricks. Linear algebra II is an expert course on row-reduction -- they don't even talk about rings or fields at all. Combinatorics is just using binomial coefficients to count how many ways there are to arrange socks. It's ridiculous in my opinion.
My question is ... is this "normal", by which I mean, are your school's math classes like this too? Or does your linear algebra class begin with a rigorous identification of fields and vector spaces? The first month of my calculus I class was devoted to sequences and sequential definitions of continuity. I don't think this is typical for intro calculus classes. We talked about finite fields in my first year algebra class. Is your school like this too?
How much rigor is in your math courses? My school has a distinct math faculty (our math program is through the math faculty, not through sciences) with a variety of math majors: combinatorics, statistics, pure math, applied math, computation, etc. Even with such a distinguished name, the math classes are jokes. They're example- and algorithm-based. We're usually provided with a general problem and then an algorithm for solving it without much rigor. Proofs aren't on the exams at all.
That said, there are advanced level courses of all first and second year core math classes. These include: Calculus I, II, III, Intro to algebra, Linear Algebra I, II, Intro to combinatorics, Intro to probability, Intro to statistics. After these, the pure math classes are pretty proof heavy -- real analysis, rings/fields/groups, geometry, graph theory, etc. I'm currently taking calculus III, linear algebra II and intro to combinatorics at the advanced level and it's pretty proof-heavy. Calculus III is epsilon-delta all over the place, lin alg II is pretty much a rings and polynomials course, and combinatorics is about bijections and power series. In calculus we've already discussed open and closed sets, compactness, uniform continuity.
The standard versions of these courses are completely different. Calculus III is about how to find partial derivatives of any function, and the idea of "limit" is reduced to algebraic tricks. Linear algebra II is an expert course on row-reduction -- they don't even talk about rings or fields at all. Combinatorics is just using binomial coefficients to count how many ways there are to arrange socks. It's ridiculous in my opinion.
My question is ... is this "normal", by which I mean, are your school's math classes like this too? Or does your linear algebra class begin with a rigorous identification of fields and vector spaces? The first month of my calculus I class was devoted to sequences and sequential definitions of continuity. I don't think this is typical for intro calculus classes. We talked about finite fields in my first year algebra class. Is your school like this too?