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Sequences, series, and multivariable calculus, AP Honors (M408D)
University of Texas at Austin, Fall semester, 2013
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Course number: M408D. Unique identifiers: 56210, 56215, 56220 (these distinguish different discussion sessions).
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Classes: MWF 9 - 10 am, CLA 0.130
Discussion sessions with TA: TTh
- 56210: 8:30 - 9:30 am., RLM 5.124
- 56215: 3:30 - 4:30 p.m., RLM 6.118;
- 56220: 5 - 6 p.m., PAR 306
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Instructor: Timothy Perutz (Assistant Professor)
Email: perutz AT math DOT utexas DOT edu
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Office hours: Wednesdays, 10:30--11:30 and 5-6 p.m., RLM 10.136.
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TA: Kent Van Vels
Email: kvanvels AT math DOT utexas DOT edu
Office hours: Tues., Thurs.., 2:30-3:30, RLM 10.106.
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Textbook: James Stewart, Calculus: Early Transcendentals, 7th Edition. Brooks/Cole, 2012.
Available from the University Co-Op bookstore.
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Homework schedule: Quest homework is due on Wednesdays at 11pm. Handwritten homework is due at the beginning of class on Fridays at 9 am.
I'm happy to answer questions about this course by email or in person (RLM 10.136). However, please read this page first, since it may well answer your query.
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Aims
The specific mathematical aims of the course are as follows: (i) To learn to work with infinite sequences and series, applying tests to establish their convergence or divergence. (ii) To learn to work with vectors in 3-dimensional space, including the dot and cross products. (iii) To learn differential calculus for functions of several variables, including partial differentiation, the notion of differentiability, and the method of Lagrange multipliers. (iv) To learn the beginnings of multivariable integral calculus.
Much of this material is highly applicable, part of the working toolkit for physicists, engineers, economists, those who use statistics, and computer programmers. It is also relevant to other sciences, including chemistry and some parts of the biomedical sciences.
Transferable skills developed in this course include problem-solving skills; the ability to think logically about precisely-defined notions; and precision of expression. Careful definitions and statements of theorems will be emphasized, but not proofs.
This course carries the university's Quantitative Reasoning flag. Quantitative Reasoning courses are designed to equip you with skills that are necessary for understanding the types of quantitative arguments you will regularly encounter in your adult and professional life.
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Is this course for you?
This is an advanced placement or honors section of M408D. It is restricted to students who have scored well on the AP/BC exam, very well on the AP/AB exam, are in the Engineering Honors Program, or have the consent of the mathematics adviser.
M408D is a fast-paced course which covers a lot of material. In this honors section, there will be a focus on more challenging problems.
To succeed in mastering this material, you will have to make a serious time-commitment to the course, including each wee, attending three lectures and two discussion sessions, doing a Quest homework and a handwritten homework assignment, and preparing for a quiz in a discussion session. The expectation is that the work you do beyond the five hours of class and discussion will require around 10 hours per week of your time. The coursework is designed so that, if you make this time commitment, you should be able to follow and learn the material through the semester. However, you cannot afford to lose your focus. Please do not take this course if you are not prepared to commit to this workload, or if you feel you would get more out of a non-honors section or slower-paced course (compare M408K/L/M and M408N/S).
It will be assumed that you have algebra and trigonometry, differential calculus and integral calculus (as in M408C) at your fingertips. By this, I don't mean that you remember every trig formula and every integral in the book, but rather that you are comfortable with techniques such as the chain rule for differentiation and integration by parts. If you are not, there will not be time within the course to catch up, so please consider taking a different course.
In lectures, my aim is to explain concepts, writing up the explanation on the blackboard, and to work through a few examples. I recommend that you copy down these explanations in your notes, along with other comments I make verbally that you think are worth recording. Writing helps maintain your concentration in lectures, and will provide you with a set of notes to refer to. If you find the copying a distraction from thinking, an alternative is to photograph each blackboard. There isn't time in lectures to go through a large number of examples, but the discussion sessions will go through more examples and problems. Other M408D sections will adopt different formats, so if this format doesn't work for you, maybe another section will suit you better.
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Syllabus
We shall cover material from chapters 10-15 from Stewart.
A syllabus and (approximate!) schedule is available in PDF format here.
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Assessment
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Exams
Midterm Exam 1: Friday, Sep 27, in class
Midterm Exam 2: Friday, Oct 25, in class
Midterm Exam 3: Friday, Nov 15, in class
Final Exam: Monday, December 16, 9:00-12:00 noon (to be confirmed). This information is from the university registrar; you can find updates, including the exam venue, at that site.
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Quizzes
There will be a 10-minute quiz in the discussion session each Tuesday. It will typically ask you to solve a problem from the previous written homework, showing your working.
No make-up quizzes will be given. To account for legitimate reasons to miss a discussion session, or unusually poor performances, the two lowest graded quiz scores will be dropped.
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Homework
This course makes use of the web-based Quest content delivery and homework server system
maintained by the College of Natural Sciences. This homework service will require a $25 charge
per student for its use, which goes toward the maintenance and operation of the resource.
Please log in to the Quest system for this class using your EID. After the 12th day of
class, when you log into Quest you will be asked to pay via credit card on a secure payment site.
You have the option to wait up to 30 days to pay while still continuing to use Quest for your
assignments. If you are taking more than one course using Quest, you will not be charged more
than $50 per semester. Quest provides mandatory instructional material for this course, just as is your
textbook, etc. For payment questions, email quest.billing@cns.utexas.edu.
There will be two types of homework assignments: Quest and handwritten. No homework will be due on midterm exam days.
Quest assignments will become available by Saturday, and will be due at 11:00 p.m. on the following Wednesdays. These are multiple choice assignments. You can receive a positive or negative score for each question, depending on how many tries you need (so don't guess wildly). However, your score for an assignment can never be negative, and you get a bonus for attempting all the questions in an assignment. The lowest 3 grades will be dropped.
Handwritten assignments will become available by Saturday, and are due on Fridays at 9 am, at the beginning of class (they need not be accepted after 9:05!). The questions will usually come from Stewart's text. Partial credit will be available. In these assignments, you must show all your working and explain yourself as clearly as you can. Some credit will be given for the quality of your explanation.
No late work will be accepted. We will drop the lowest 2 handwritten assignments to allow for legitimate reasons for not turning in an assignment.
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Grading
The course components will be assigned the following weights:
- Quest homework: 10%
- Written homework: 10%
- Quizzes: 5%
- Midterm 1: 15%
- Midterm 2: 15%
- Midterm 2: 15%
- Final exam: 30%
Your final exam grade will replace the lowest of your three midterm exam grades, if the final exam score is higher than one of them.
Plus/minus grades will be assigned for the final grade in this course.
All your grades will be posted on Quest (not on Blackboard!). It is your responsibility to ensure that your grades are recorded correctly on Quest. If an error occurs you must alert the instructor within two weeks from the date when the correct grade should have appeared.
Your grades for assignments will be recorded as percentages.
At the end of the course, your weighted total will be computed using the weights and rules described above. Your letter grade is determined by your weighted total. I will decide the grade cutoffs at the end of the semester, based partly on class performance (so there will be some "grading to the curve"). I will take into account the fact that this is an honors section.
The cutoffs will be no stricter than the following: D for 60 or above, C- for 70 or above, C for 73 or above, C+ for 77 or above, B- for 80 or above, B for 83 or above, B+ for 87 or above, A- for 90 or above, and an A for 93 or above. The scale is likely to be more lenient than that, but that is at my discretion. These are lower bounds for your grade!
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Further information and policies
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Optional Materials
Calculators and Wolfram Alpha may be used to check the accuracy of your homework. However, neither will be available in exams. Since the main role of homework is to learn the material well enough to take the quizzes and exams, you are strongly advised to work through the problems by hand.
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Special concerns
Students with special concerns, such as athletes who might miss class meetings, students with religious observances that interfere with class meetings, or students with disabilities who need special accommodation, should all notify the instructor by the 12th class day, that is, Friday September 13, about these special needs.
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Disabilities
Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD), 512-471-6259. If you think this may apply to you, please take action as early as possible. If SSD recommends that accommodations be made, please alert me immediately so that there is time to implement the accommodations effectively.
One standard accommodation is extra time in exams. If you are granted extra exam time, you will need to book a place in SSD to take those exams (you can't take them in class, because the room will be in use), and I will need to sign a form and arrange delivery of your exam. Book early, because SSD fills up! If you don't set things up with SSD and me in good time, we may not be able to offer the accommodation.
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Deadlines for Dropping a Course
If you drop a class on or before September 13, the class will not show up on your transcript. If you drop a class after that date, the course will show up on the transcript with a Q grade. After November 5, it is not possible to drop a course except for extenuating (usually non-academic) circumstances.
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Attendance
This course is structured with the expectation that you will attend every lecture and discussion session, and your grade will benefit from your attendance. If absence from a class is necessary, you should contact a classmate to get notes, due dates and other information for the class you missed. Just in case, please introduce yourself to, and note down contact information of, at least three classmates. Please don't ask me for notes or for a summary of what you missed.
Please come to class on time. Coming and going during class is distracting to your fellow students. Please do not talk or otherwise disturb students in the class who are trying to learn.
All computers, cell phones and other electronic devices must be silenced and put away out of sight during exams. They should also be silenced and put out of sight during class, unless they are being used for the class (e.g., it's OK to use a camera to photograph the blackboard).
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Academic dishonesty
Academic dishonesty, such as cheating in tests or plagiarizing work, will not be tolerated, and may result in a failing grade and other measures under the rules of UT.
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Resources
The following resources may help you with this course:
- Drop-in tutoring and exam reviews (free) and private tutoring (not free) for this class are available in the UT Sanger Learning Center in Jester A332. There are also some free workshops and classes.
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Residential Halls Study Groups are (free) tutoring groups that meet at the study tables in Jester West and Kinsolving dorms on Sunday - Thursday nights 7:30 - 10:30pm.
- Both your TA and I have office hours, and are happy to meet with you.
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Come as soon as you have questions - if you wait, it will be hard or impossible to catch up.
- The mathematics department undergraduate computer lab is located in RLM 7.122, has 40 computers, and is open to all students enrolled in Math courses. Students can sign up for an individual account themselves in the computer lab using their UT EID.
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Emergencies
The following recommendations regarding Emergency Evacuation are from the Office of Campus Safety and Security:
- Occupants of buildings on The University of Texas at Austin campus are required to evacuate buildings when a fire alarm is activated. Alarm activation or announcement requires exiting and assembling outside.
- Familiarize yourself with all exit doors of each classroom and building you may occupy. Remember that the nearest exit door may not be the one you used when entering the building.
- Students requiring assistance in evacuation shall inform their instructor in writing during the first week of class.
- In the event of an evacuation, follow the instruction of faculty or class instructors.
- Do not re-enter a building unless given instructions by the following: Austin Fire Department, The University of Texas at Austin Police Department, or Fire Prevention Services office.
- Behavior Concerns Advice Line (BCAL): 512-232-5050
- A link to information regarding emergency evacuation routes and emergency procedures can be found here.
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