All information concerning specifically sections 7-9 of MA 113 will be posted on this page. All other information for MA 113 can be found on the common web page for MA 113 at http://www.ms.uky.edu/~heidegl/Ma113S10/Ma113.html.
| Name: | Benjamin Braun | Email: | benjamin.braun "at" uky "dot" edu. |
| Office: | Room 831 in Patterson Office Tower | Office Phone: | 257-6810 |
| Office hours: | MWF 1-1:45 PM and by appointment. | Homepage: | http://www.ms.uky.edu/~braun |
Classes meet MWF 2:00 - 2:50 PM in Sloane Research Building Room 303.
Time and Place of Recitations:Our class consists of three sections for recitations.
Section 007 meets TR 12:30 - 1:45 in CB 217.
The teaching assistant is Sara Ellis: sellis "at" ms "dot" uky "dot" edu.
Section 008 meets TR 2:00 - 3:15 in CB 315.
The teaching assistant is Jeffrey Vanasse: jvanasse "at" ms "dot" uky "dot" edu.
Section 009 meets TR 3:30 - 4:45 in CB 347.
The teaching assistant is Sara Ellis: sellis "at" ms "dot" uky "dot" edu.
In addition to the 4 hours of credit for MA 113, the department offers one additional hour of credit for MA 193 on a pass/fail basis. You will pass MA 193 if you have at most 2 unexcused absences during MA 113 recitations and you pass MA 113. If you fail MA 113 or have 3 or more unexcused absences you will fail MA 193. Your section number for MA 193 has to equal your section number for MA 113. That means, if you drop or change sections of MA 113, please make sure to also drop or change sections of MA 193!
Attendance and Classroom Behavior:I will take classroom attendance about 20 times randomly throughout the semester. The teaching assistants will take attendance for recitations every time (see MA 193). Your attendance score will be based on the percentage of lectures you attend.
The teaching assistants will take attendance for recitations every time (see MA 193). Have in mind that not bringing the recitation worksheets to recitation classes results in an unexcused absence.
"I knew that a calculus was a little stone, or pebble... Little stones were once used for calculations like addition and multiplication, so any new method of calculating came to be called a 'calculus'. For example, when methods for calculating probabilities were first introduced, they were called the Probability Calculus. Nowadays, we would just call it probability theory, and the word 'calculus' has similarly disappeared from most other such titles. But one new method of calculation, The Differential and Integral Calculus, was so important that it soon became known as The Calculus, and eventually simply Calculus."
Michael Spivak, from Chapter 1 of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Calculus."Calculus emerged in the seventeenth century as a system of shortcuts to results obtained by the method of exhaustion and as a method for discovering such results. The types of problem for which calculus proved suitable were finding lengths, areas, and volumes of curved figures and determining local properties such as tangents, normals, and curvature -- in short, what we now recognize as problems of integration and differentiation. Equivalent problems of course arise in mechanics, where one of the dimensions is time instead of distance, hence it was calculus that made mathematical physics possible...
The extraordinary success of calculus was possible, in the first instance, because it replaced long and subtle exhaustion arguments by short routine calculations. As the name suggests, calculus consists of rules for calculating results, not their logical justification."
John Stillwell, from Chapter 9 of Mathematics and its History."...the calculus pioneers operated more on intuition than reason. Admittedly, their intuition was often very good, with Euler in particular possessing an uncanny ability to know just how far he could go before plunging into the mathematical abyss... Still, the foundations of calculus were suspect.
...the [first major] critic [of calculus] was George Berkeley (1685-1753), noted philosopher and Bishop of Cloyne. In his 1734 essay The Analyst, Berkeley ridiculed those scientists who accused him of proceeding on faith and not reason, yet who themselves talked of infinitely small or vanishing quantities. To Berkeley this was at best fuzzy thinking and at worst hypocrisy...
Berkeley did not dispute the conclusions that mathematicians had drawn from these suspect techniques; it was the logic behind them that he rejected. True, the calculus was a wonderful vehicle for finding tangent lines and determining maxima or minima. But he argued that its correct answers arose from incorrect thinking, as certain mistakes cancelled out others in a compensation of errors that obscured the underlying flaws...Although the results of calculus seemed to be valid and, when applied to real-world phenomena like mechanics or optics, yielded solutions that agreed with observations, none of this mattered if the foundations were rotten."
William Dunham, from Chapter 5 of The Calculus Gallery.