The course is full because the lecture hall, the section meeting rooms, or both, are filled to capacity. The only way to get in is to wait until an opening occurs because someone has dropped the course, and register via STAR. After October 3, you need an entry code (and $20) to do so. There is now a waiting list for Math 126 entry codes. If you submitted your request before 5:00pm on Wednesday, October 4, you were placed on the waiting list by lottery, and you should already have been informed of your position on the list by e-mail. If you are not currently on the list, you can have your name placed at the bottom of the list by sending e-mail to Professor Lee, but you're unlikely to get in.
There are always a number of people who drop the course during the first two weeks, and in the past everyone who has wanted to register for the course has been able to do so. However, this time the demand is greater than usual and the 9:30 lecture hall is smaller than usual, so we probably won't be able to accommodate everyone who wants to take the course.
If you have not registered for the course, but are on the waiting list, you should attend lectures and a section of your choice, and turn in all the homework and quizzes. Be sure to inform the TA of what you're doing. If you officially get into a section, be sure to tell your new TA who has your quiz and homework scores.
The only way to change sections is to do so officially through STAR, when an opening becomes available in another section because someone has dropped. If you want to change sections, and are not already on the waiting list, you should contact Professor Lee by e-mail as soon as possible.
Until October 10, when the course list is finalized, you may attend whichever section is most convenient for you, if you're on the waiting list for that section. After that, you must attend the section for which you're registered. Please do not try to make an "informal" section switch; it's only likely to make us lose track of your work.
The current version of the Lecture Notes is 94.9b. The version used last year, 94.9a, is exactly the same, except that some typographical errors have been corrected (by hand) in 94.9b. Thus, if you don't mind coping with a few more errors, you may use 94.9a. If you want to use any version earlier than 94.9a, please bring it to Professor Lee.
The problems for this course virtually all require you to think through what needs to be done, based on your understanding of the concepts; there are very few "cookbook"-type problems for which there is a recipe that you can follow again and again. There are examples in the notes--the problems that are integrated into the text--but what they are trying to illustrate is how to think through problems involving different concepts. For this reason, there would be very little point in giving you examples written up complete with already-thought-out solutions. We will try to help you work through as many of the in-text problems as we have time for in lecture and section. Those that we don't have time for you should try to do on your own while you're reading the text. If you have trouble with them, ask one of us at office hours or in section, or ask a tutor at the Math Study Center.
Every problem in [LN] illustrates an important concept or gives you an essential bit of practice at manipulating a mathematical idea. Without doing all the problems, you can't really master this material. This course has always come with the expectation that students will work out all the problems in the notes, but in our experience students frequently don't do problems that they aren't required to turn in. This way, you're much more likely to do all the problems, and you're likely to get much more out of the course.
Since this is a 5-credit course, and the University's expectation is that each credit represents three hours per week of student effort on the average, the workload for this course is designed under the assumption that you will spend an average total of 15 hours per week on this course. This means that most of you will have to spend an average of two hours a day outside of class on this course, every day, five days a week. On some days, some of you will have to spend considerably more than two hours.
We rarely give partial credit for wrong answers on quizzes. There are two reasons for this: one practical, one pedagogical. The practical reason is simply that we don't have the resources to dig carefully through your work on your quizzes to see if you "had the right idea." We prefer that the TA's spend more time preparing for section meetings and less time grading quizzes. The pedagogical reason is more subtle: although it is undeniably important to have the main idea and "see the big picture," in any real-world applications of mathematics it is equally important that you be able to work accurately and quickly and be reasonably sure of coming up with right answers. Since most homework problems are not graded on the basis of correctness, it is a useful discipline to have a situation in which correctness is important. On the midterm and final, however, we will take much more time to look over your work, and we'll generally be much more generous with partial credit.
Yes. In fact, we encourage you to work on the homework collaboratively with a study group. The only restriction is that you must write up your own solutions in your own words. For more information, see the section on homework in the Course Description.
On homework, yes. Calculators will be neither needed nor allowed on quizzes. If you get an answer that involves complicated arithmetic, just leave it in unsimplified form, such as
On exams, but not on quizzes, you may use a "crib sheet" in the form of two 8 1/2" by 11" one-sided pages (or one sheet written on both sides) of your own handwritten notes; no photocopied or printed material is allowed. It's a good exercise for you to figure out what's important enough to put on your "crib sheet," and it allows you to focus your attention during the exam on solving problems rather than remembering formulas.
No, not during quizzes or exams. If you need to draw perpendicular lines, you can use the square end of your ruler. If you need to draw parallel lines, you can draw two perpendiculars, or (if the lines are not too far apart) you can draw them "by eye" using the lines or edges of your ruler.
Notice first that two vectors are parallel if and only if one is a non-zero scalar multiple of the other. For two vectors to point in the same direction (which is a stronger condition than just being parallel), one must be a positive scalar multiple of the other. Therefore our vector w must be a positive scalar multiple of v.
To figure out what multiple, it's probably easiest to think of the operation in two steps: first find a unit vector u in the same direction as v, and then find our desired vector w as a scalar multiple of u. As usual, we can just set u = (1 / |v| ) v; for definiteness, let's suppose that we find (by measurement or by computation) that v has length 4, so that u = (1/4) v. Then in order for w to have length 7, it just has to be 7 times u, or
w = (7) (1/4) v = (7/4) v.