Math 2423 (Calculus II)

Fall 2014

American persimmon (Diospyros virginiana). American persimmons range in throughout the southeast United States. You can find quite a few in the woods east of Norman. They are sweet and tasty when fully soft and ripe, but beware of the unripe persimmons, which are bitter and astringent. Folklore has it that a bumper crop of persimmons in the fall presages a hard winter. If that's true, then this winter will probably be pretty hard, since the persimmon trees in our neighborhood were loaded with fruit this fall. This image taken from the Chickasaw Nation webpage.

Instructor:

John Albert

Office: PHSC 1004, Ext. 5-3782.

Office hours: Mon and Wed, 2:30-3:30 AM; Thursday 10:30-11:30 PM (or by appointment)

E-mail: jalbert@ou.edu

Help Center:

There is a Mathematics Center on the second floor of the Physical Sciences Center (PHSC 209) where math graduate students are available for free help with math classes up through calculus. The Help Center is open Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 am to 5:30 pm, and Fridays from 9:30 am to 3:30 pm.

Announcements

Syllabus for this course.

Homework

Homework is due in your discussion sections each week.

Assignment

Due week

Problems

1 Jan. 20 to 24 4.1 #4,5; 4.2 #1, 35, 37, 59; (to be continued)

2 Jan. 27 to 31

Quiz dates

Quiz 1:

Quiz 2:

Quiz 3:

Quiz 4:

Quiz 5:

Quiz 6:

Quiz 7:

Exam dates

Exam 1: Friday,

Exam 2: Friday,

Exam 3: Friday,

Final Exam: Monday, ? at ? pm

Links

The Indian mathematician I mentioned in class Nov. 10 is Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Here is a nice online version of Euclid's "Elements". The Wikipedia article "Euclid's Elements" is also a good place to start learning about this work.
Newton's Principia is a physics book, not a calculus book. However, it represents the first appearance of the modern theory of calculus. It is more difficult to read than Euclid's Elements, and you won't recognize any of the familiar formulas in your calculus text, but the calculus is there, present in a geometric guise. You can find the Principia online by looking at the references in the Wikipedia article on "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica". But maybe a better way to approach it would be to first read the overview in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-principia/.
Here is an online version of the classic text, "Differential and Integral Calculus" by Richard Courant. I recommend reading it along with our text. Start at section 2.1.
Last spring the New York Times ran an interesting set of columns by Steven Strogatz introducing readers to some mathematical topics, including calculus.
An explanation of Archimedes' geometric proof for the formula for the sum of the first n squares is in the article Calculus before Newton and Liebnitz: Part II by David Bressoud.
You can find a brief introduction to planimeters (mechanical devices for measuring areas of regions in the plane) at the Wikipedia article on planimeters, along with links to more complete discussion. In particular, there is a link to Robert Foote's planimeter pages where you can find a geometric explanation of how planimeters work.

Assignment	Due week	Problems
1	Jan. 20 to 24	4.1 #4,5; 4.2 #1, 35, 37, 59; (to be continued)
2	Jan. 27 to 31