Practice exams:
Practice exam 1
Practice exam 2 . Check back later for solutions.
Office Hours: Mondays, 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm
If that time proves insufficient, or if you are unable to make it during that time, I am happy to make an appointment to meet with you at a different time.
Homework:
Problem sets consisting of 5 problems each will be handed out during class every day, except during the last week of classes. Thus, you will have a weekly assignement of 20 problems, and there will be 5 such assignments during the course. Each assignment is worth 5% of your final score. Of this, 4% is for seriously attempting all the problems, and the remaining 1% is for the solution to a problem that I will pick from each day's homework amd grade.
You are strongly encouraged to work together on homework. However, the answers must be written up independently.
Please write the answers to homework problems neatly in the space provided on the problem-set-printouts that I hand out. If you need additional space, please use blank A4 sheets, and staple them together.
Pay attention to presentatation: a good answer is a sequence of logically related (mathematical) sentences/equations, with the logical relations made explicit. In short, a reader should be able to follow each step in the thread of your argument. Random calculations do not qualify as a valid answer.
In case you are unable to make it to class on a certain day, you can find the homework posted here.
Quizzes:
There will be a 15-20 minute quiz held in class every Tuesday. There will be 5 quizzes in all, each worth 5% of the final grade.
The purpose of the quiz is to ensure that you have spent some time familiarizing yourself with the basic ideas introduced during lectures in the previous week, without introducing the pressure of weekly exams. Quiz questions will be short and conceptual, and will not involve tedious calculations or clever tricks.
Exams:
There will be a midterm exam on Thursday, June 19, and a final exam on Thursday, July 3. Each exam will be worth 25% of your final score.
Both exams will be held in class, and will be 2 hours long. There will be 5 questions on each exam, of which you must attempt 4. I will post a sample exam at some point.
Grades:
Your final letter grade will be determined based on your final score (which is calculated as explained above), and my judgement of what letter grade corresponds to each numerical score. I do not plan to employ statistical methods ("curves"). This means that if everyone does extremely well, everyone could, in principle, get an A.
Recitations:
If time permits, we may turn some of the classes into recitations.