Information concerning sections 001-004 and 013-016 of MA 113 will be posted on this page.
All other information for MA 113 can be found on the Fall 2012 MA 113 common web page.
In sections 001-004 and 013-016 we will follow the grading scheme described in the common syllabus, with no alterations.
| Name: | Benjamin Braun | Email: | benjamin.braun "at" uky "dot" edu. |
| Office: | Room 831 in Patterson Office Tower | Office Phone: | 257-6810 |
| Office hours: | Mon at 11AM in Mathskeller Wed/Fri at 10AM in POT 831 and by appointment. |
Homepage: | http://www.ms.uky.edu/~braun |
Lectures meet on MWF.
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!
The teaching assistants will take attendance for recitations every time (see MA 193 information on the common web page). Keep in mind that not bringing the recitation worksheets to recitation classes results in an unexcused absence. Attendance in recitation is required for a passing grade for MA 193, and is strongly recommended for everybody. Recitations are the place where you have a chance to actively engage, work problems under guidance, seek assistance, and communicate with your peers and the instructor.
Attendance in lectures will be taken beginning after Labor Day. Attendance will be taken daily. Your attendance score is based on the percentage of lectures you attend. You will receive full credit (40 points, see the common web page) if you have at most 2 unexcused absences.
All students are expected to follow the academic integrity standards as explained in the University Senate Rules, particularly Chapter 6, found at this page. Turn off all cell phones, pagers, etc. prior to entering the classroom. You are not to use your cell phones, pagers, or other electronic devices during class. An attitude of respect for and civility towards other students in the class and the instructor is expected at all times.
You are expected to read the assigned sections in the textbook prior to lecture. For example, for class on Friday, August 24, you should read section 1.6. I will assume that all students have read their textbook prior to lecture.
Suggestions for reading mathematics:One of your challenges as a student will be to keep track of the concept images you personally use in relation to the concept definitions we use as a community (these ideas are described in the quote below). When we define derivatives, integrals, etc and when we state theorems in precise language, we are capturing a certain idea. You need to develop your own set of concept images to put these formal ideas into context, and to make sense of what we are doing.
"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.Information about trig functions: Trig function review.