Hi I was wondering if anyone who had taken Math 1LS3 and had taken the Math 1AA3 course finds it? In terms of profs and material how did you find the overall course? Would you recommend taking it summer or in the regular school year?

Originally Posted by SamM

Hi I was wondering if anyone who had taken Math 1LS3 and had taken the Math 1AA3 course finds it? In terms of profs and material how did you find the overall course? Would you recommend taking it summer or in the regular school year?

It seems (according to the 2010-2011 calendar) that they are offering 1LT3 as a successor course to 1LS3. That would probably be a better choice than 1AA3, considering 1LS3 v 1A03...

The textbook for 1A03/1AA3 sucks beyond belief. If you take 1AA3, make sure you get Mike for your TA ;] Also, it requires a lot more practice, unlike 1LS3 where you could do the assignments and you're ready for the test. Also, read the textbook before class. I know, it's a drag, but I'm honestly clueless during class if I don't.

I'm taking 1aa3 now, the prof is good and the book is helpful.
If you study and actually do assigned problems, it's not bad. Although 1LS3 did not help me much.

I personally love the textbook for Math 1A03/1AA3. In fact, I'm doing a minor in math, and use the textbook for help in several of my second-year mathematics courses due to the fact that I find it explains topics better than the mandatory textbooks for those courses.

Really? That's very interesting. I find some parts of the textbook were not helpful at all, like the Taylor series sections. But that could just be me, since I learn best from examples rather than from reading the theory.

I will agree that the Taylor series sections were among the least helpful of the textbook, but I still find them to be above par compared to a lot of other math textbooks I've used.

And I guess that textbook preferences do really depend on learning style.

Unfortunately, since Taylor Series is very technical and involves a lot of subtle details, it's difficult to come up with good solid examples to illustrate all of these examples. (Math gets increasingly theoretical as you progress through the years)

I tried to give some 'down to earth' explanations of why the Taylor Series stuff was true in my tutorials (I'm currently TAing the course), like the fact that a Taylor Series is only a local approximation comes alive (in my opinion) by looking at a bounded function like sin(x)...the approximations Tn(x) all blow up to either + or - infinity, and so are 'eventually' crappy estimates.

But unfortunately not all of the subtle details are so easily identified. Personally, I like the textbook a lot better than other textbooks I've gotten my hands on.


To the original poster, (again, speaking as TA of the course) my advice would be to go see your TAs/profs regularly during their office hours. Don't feel like you're imposing, or wasting our time, it's what we're paid for! There will inevitably be times when you're missing some small, very subtle detail that will snowball into a larger problem. Namely, you're missing out on some easy fact or technique that could easily be explained to you, and the material builds on it resulting in a lot of confusion.

The students who jumped from 1LS3 to 1AA3 all seem to be handling it well this term...in particular the ones who come see me regularly.


I would recommend taking the course during the year (and not the summer) since you have essentially twice as long to digest the material...in the summer it's faster paced and while not overly difficult, you want to make sure you have opportunities to ask questions and learn things at a better pace.