Link to Current (updated) notes

Lecture Notes

Lecture notes (like these) will be available for you to print out for each lecture. The lecture notes will be available at: http://pruffle.mit.edu/3.016. These will supplement (not replace) the textbook. The lecture notes also serve as a guide to help the student understand what parts of the text are considered more relevant or important.

The specific purpose of the notes is to provide neatly typeset equations and graphics that will be used in the lecture along with a few observations. This will eliminate the time required to write and draw, perhaps a bit sloppily, for you in your notes and for me on the blackboard.

The lecture notes will have reading assignments printed at the beginning of each lecture; they will look like this:
Reading:
Kreyszig Sections: §6.1 (pp:304-09) , §6.2 (pp:312-18) , §6.3 (pp:321-23) , §6.4 (pp:331-36)

Much of what is important is spoken by the lecturer (or in the form of welcome questions and points of clarification by the students) and some explanatory notes will be written upon the blackboard. Mixing projected displays of equations and graphs with blackboard writing will allow incremental adjustments to the best learning pace.

The notes will have places for you to fill in auxiliary discussion and explanation. Those places will look like this:
You can use these notes in several ways. You could print them out before lecture and write your own lecture notes directly during the lecture. You could take lecture notes on your own paper and then neatly copy them onto a printout later. You could print them before lecture and write on them rapidly and then copy--neatly and thoughtfully--notes onto a freshly printed set of lecture. I recommend the latter for effective learning and the creation of a set of notes that might provide future reference material--but do whatever works for you.

The lecture notes will also refer to MATHEMATICA$^{\text{\scriptsize {\textregistered }}}$ notebooks available on the 3.016 website for downloading. These notebooks will be used as MATHEMATICA$^{\text{\scriptsize {\textregistered }}}$ sessions during the lectures to illustrate specific points and provide examples for you to help solve homework problems.

References to MATHEMATICA$^{\text{\scriptsize {\textregistered }}}$ notebooks look like this:

MATHEMATICA$^{\text{\scriptsize {\textregistered }}}$ Example

(notebook Lecture-01)

(html Lecture-01)

(xml+mathml Lecture-01)

1. Starting Mathematica.

   
   

2. Defining symbols and performing simple operations on them.

   
   

3. Saving Mathematica and Quitting.

   
   

They will serve as place-holders in the lecture note when we switch from chalkboard and/or projected display of the notes to a live MATHEMATICA$^{\text{\scriptsize {\textregistered }}}$ session.