Math is definitely my favorite class even though my skills are somewhat lacking. Taught by Mr. Barys we learn math with a pretty interesting approach. If you’re here to get a head start then it’ll be a good idea to learn a programming language (we use a program called Mathematica ), but you’ll get through it even if you don’t know any programming. Mathematica is probably going to give you the biggest grief in the beginning of the year and if you can master this easily you’re labs and POWs will become a lot easier.
What I like about math the most is how we take math that’s actually challenging and we don’t follow the “text book” approach. You do problems that make you think of math in different ways and it alters your perspective of math and how you view the world.
If you've never dealt with tetrahedrons start reading up. They're going to be with you for a while...
If you would like to see the kind of work we do, here are some of the very first labs done. All three utilized Mathematica:
GasWriteUp.pdf This was a small group porject that we worked on trying to model with trying to find how far should you go to find the best price. It was one of our first modeling things we've done so there are many things that we still have to learn, but hopefully it gives a taste on the kind of things we are trying to do.
Hanford,Oregon.pdf This lab was to learn how to use Mathematica to create linear models. Its basicly to get a handle and to become proficient in using the software.
TakeHome1.pdf This was the assesment that we had to do which sums up all our practices about linear models. The inclass part was a killer since you had no reference to other works (at least for me it was) but this one was a bit eaiser and I tried not to use my sources.
Composition Functions.pdf This assignment was to find out what happens to functions when certain functions are composed with each other. We were learning about the composition of functions which means using the output of one function as the input of another function: e.g f[x] and g[x] -> f[g[x]]. What we did before this lesson was discuss what the Tool box functions were (they’re just the basic functions) and this lesson taught us how composing these functions together can make any function we wanted.
