Recent content by 20Tauri

My college roommate from a few years back did the math semester and she loved it. Stayed with a family, did some traveling, learned a bit of Hungarian. I hear it's also good if you want to focus more on your combinatorics. The only specific things I really remember about it were that she said...

You can learn a lot of stuff--calculus and higher math, programming, and (I think) physics, from khanacademy.com. It's videos and quizzes, although not all the subjects actually have quizzes (I think in math, for example, they stop having them around where calc I would end). That might help...

It depends on how much time your want to spend in school, and how easily you can fund it. But you can have two master's degrees, yeah, it's a thing. My dad has an MBA and a master's in Comp Sci.

I don't know a whole lot about this, as I didn't have that sort of option at my undergrad school and I am a master's student at a rather average state university. But I would assume that an A- would certainly be fine, and most likely a B would be fine as well, since you are an undergrad taking...

I think cgk and Choppy both have good advice. It sounds like you've been taking these things seriously for a while, although it's not clear to me how well you're doing--are you getting C's and B-'s on exams, or as final course grades? I think it's definitely possible to study something that's...

You're doing five textbooks of that level of difficulty in your free time? Seriously? O_O I'm just doing some calc review. I have a copy of Calculus for Scientists and Engineers by Briggs, Cochran, et al. It's not great, but it has precalc through vector calc, so it's pretty much a one-stop...

Well, what is it that you want to do? Are you trying to do something like quantum computing that you're interested in combining physics and CS?

Yeah, probably. At my school we did a lot of Mathematica stuff even in the lower-division math classes, and programming knowledge would have been helpful (but not necessary) going into stuff like that.

I did visit one school before I applied. I had been corresponding with the graduate director for the math department (I didn't have a traditional background and so I had been wondering if/how I could transition). The director mentioned that I was welcome to come take a look at the school if I...

I did a BA in creative writing at a small liberal arts college, with a fairly substantial side study of math, so your mileage may vary. In my experience: *How many classes does a full-time college student take per semester? >> My school did trimesters. We had three ten-week terms a year...

If I could figure out how to retain information beyond the exams I'd have it made--as it is, I'm lucky if I remember the beginning of the class when I'm taking the final. I think doing lots of practice problems helps, but if you want to remember something, math is pretty much use it or lose it...

Ask your advisor or consult your college's course catalog. At some schools, it can be tricky to obtain a minor; at others, it isn't possible to graduate without one.

I'd be interested in learning more about this, too. I've taken two courses in elementary number theory and really enjoyed them. I've heard that analytic number theory is a tougher field to get into than algebraic number theory, but that's second-hand knowledge and so I don't know if it's true...

Well, in a junior college setting, you will probably have people with master's degrees teaching at least some of the classes. Additionally, some people teach junior/community college on a part-time or adjunct basis, so they may not have "professorships," per se, even though they are professors...

Yeah, that's how I understood it. Also, here's my two cents on the "bad professors teaching linear algebra" thing. At my school, anyway, you were fairly likely to get a professor who'd scare you into learning things--kind of a sink or swim situation. I wouldn't say that we worried about...