Math 53 Fall 2020, Sections 201 and 203

Section 201 meets MWF at 8am on Zoom (see bCourses for link and password).

Section 203 meets MWF at 9am on Zoom (see bCourses for link and password).

Office hours: Thursday 11:30am-12:30pm, Friday 10am-11am via Zoom.

Important dates and deadlines

HW will be collected via Gradescope by section time on Mondays.

Quizzes will happen in section on some Mondays. The primary purpose of the quizzes is to make sure you are staying on top of the material.

Midterm 1 was Thursday, September 24 during lecture.

Midterm 2 was Tuesday, November 10 during lecture.

The final exam will be Wednesday, December 16 from 3-6pm.

Final exam study materials

A (possibly slightly hard) practice final written by me, along with solutions.

A few practice final exams written by your peers (shared with permission):

Practice final 1

Practice final 2 and solutions

Practice final 3

There were a lot of good practice problems submitted.

Various past Math 53 exams.

Even more past Math 53 exams and solutions.

Helpful links and other notes

Student learning center offers drop-in tutoring and study groups; full Fall 2020 schedule for Math 53 support has not yet been released

Some useful trigonometric identities.

Desmos, a nice online 3D graphing tool.

My webpage from Fall 2018 in Math 53 (note that it was with a different professor).

My webpage from Spring 2018 in Math 53 (note that it was with a different professor).

My webpage from Summer 2018 in Math 53 (note that as a summer class, I was in charge of the entire course and not just leading discussion sections).

Some optional challenge problems about calculus with functions of a complex variable (like you see in Math 185) and some more about a more general/abstract framework for vector calculus, the language of differential forms.

These are not totally rigorous/complete, but should give a taste of some of the ways the ideas of chapter 16 are similar to/lead to further topics in math.

Some study strategies I like using (your mileage may vary):

• Make sure you have a clear understanding of all the key definitions, theorems, and formulas.
• Often, the process of making a cheat sheet turns out to be more helpful than actually using it during the test.
• Try teaching the material to someone else. Even just talking through the material out loud without an audience can be useful. When you have to clearly explain something, it can often solidify your understanding or point out which parts of a concept you are having trouble with.
• After finishing a homework problem, especially one that gave you trouble, think for a minute or two about why your solution worked, any alternative approaches that might work (or why the way you did it really is the best way), and any similar problems you could solve with the same kinds of techniques.
• Try writing your own problems (for example, thinking up a true/false question about some conceptual subtlety that you were tripped up by once).

Section handouts and screen captures

Quizzes

Quizzes happen 8:50-9:00 and 9:50-10:00 (with an extra 5 minutes for Gradescope submissions) approximately every two weeks in section.

Problems will be visible on Gradescope and at the links below at the start of the quiz.

I will drop the lowest quiz grade and do some renormalization if my two sections have very different quiz averages over the course of the semester.

I recommend trying the other section's quiz for practice.