UCU Science course 111, year 2004 (Spring)

The lectures of this course (on Thursdays) are taught by Frits Beukers. The training of Mathematica (on Mondays) and the "help" function while you are working on the assignment is taken care off by Yaroslav Kondratyuk (kondraty@math.uu.nl) and Jan Kuiper

The SCI111 course is not a full fledged calculus course. This would take far more time than the weeks we are allotted. Instead we have selected a few topics which occur at many places in mathematics and its applications, e.g. physics, chemistry, econometrics. To some extent we shall develop a minimal technical skill in these topics, so that you know how the calculations should be performed with pencil and paper. But more importantly we shall make you acquainted with the mathematical package Mathematica. This computer programme contains an enormous treasure of mathematical knowledge, beautiful graphics capabilities and a very user friendly interface (although not every beginning student might attest to this). With some skill in it, Mathematica can be a powerful tool to study mathematical phenomena which otherwise would far beyond your capabilities.

Every week there will be a training session in Mathematica. These sessions are an integral part of the course. They complement and illustrate the lectures, and they allow you to do your own computations on the topics involved. This skill is of utmost importance when you work on the assignments, in which much of the work can only be done using Mathematica.

The course is divided into four periods of comparable size. Each period is ended by a small written examination. At the beginning of each period a home work assignment is distributed which has to be handed in before the beginning of the next period. Both the assignments and written examinations are graded and contribute equally to the final grade, which is also determined by them. The only condition is that you must have scored a C or more on at least three written exams.

There is no homework in the strict sense of the word (except the assignments), but you are expected to know the subjects discussed in class. This means that you should read the notes that go with the lectures and work out the exercises at the end of each chapter of these notes. Moreover, you should have worked through the Mathematica Notebooks, since they are supposed to enhance your understanding (once you have understood how to deal with Mathematica).

The Course material will consist of

Below you find a schedule of the activities for Science course 111, listed by the week. The Mathematica Notebooks can be found in the home-directory of the Science 111 course at UCU on the P-drive (P:\Science\Math\111). But you can also download them from this page (right click and choose "Save link as...").