Recent content by brocks

If you read this forum for a while, you will see that there is a fairly small number of prolific posters, who always give the same answer to your question, which has been asked a thousand times. Some posters here are mathematicians, and either never knew (because of their extremely high...

Lieb's book is a graduate-level text. The prereqs he lists sound more like what you would learn in an undergrad analysis class than the normal freshman calculus sequence, at least in the US. There are books with "Calculus" in their title that include analysis, notably those by Spivak, Apostol...

No, you can't assume two quantites are equal. If you assume they are equal and get 1=1, you haven't proved anything. -3 = 3? Assume they are equal. Square both sides, then divide through by 9, and you get 1 = 1. Does that sound right to you? In fact, if you have any x and y, where x and y...

I wouldn't want to do it in my head, but here's a pretty simple formula to get the sidereal time at Greenwich for any date and time. From there, you just adjust for your longitude, as you did above...

Actually, that would be a good exercise for you. You start with the fact that you know exactly what the sines are for 30, 45, and 60 degrees, because you know that the sides are 1:1 or 1:2. Then study the proofs for the formulae that give the sines of A+B, A-B, A/2, and A*2 until you...

Also, what is your environment, and what is your objective? Do you really mean C, or do you mean C++? Are you on Linux, or Windows, or something else? Do you plan to use gcc, or Visual C Express, or something else as a compiler? Do you want to become a professional programmer, or do you...

I don't want to brag, but I absolutely sailed through my math courses until we got to long division. But seriously, if you look at the website of almost any major university, you will see that the math department has its majors take core courses, and then let's them specialize in an area of...

If you follow professional golf, you know that the final playoff event before the Tour Championship starts tomorrow. During the regular season, in addition to tons of money, the players earn points according to how they finish in each event. The points charts are here...

Understanding Physics, by Isaac Asimov, would probably be good for you.

Because most people are not physicists. EM forces and fields are a large part of a physics curriculum. But you have seen how much stronger electromagnetic forces are than gravity, you just didn't realize what you were seeing. Most kids have seen that if you get a small static charge on a...

Presumably, universities want their students to understand physics concepts as deeply as possible, and most of them have settled on approximately the same order of courses, which is laid out in their online catalogs. So just look at the curricula of some universities you would like to attend...

Larson, Stewart, Thomas, and the other big fat freshman calc books that have gone through several (6+) editions are all good, which is why they are so widely used. And they all cover the same material at about the same level, so it's just a matter of personal preference which one you use. The...

Euclid in its orginal form (translated, of course) would be very, very difficult for a self-learner of any age, let alone someone your age. But there is a website that accompanies Euclid with Java applets and explanatory comments that is one of the true gems of the internet...

Ben Crowell has some free physics texts, for both majors and non-majors, here: http://www.lightandmatter.com/books.html. But by far the best resources on the net are the free courses from MIT, designed especially for self-learners. Here's the first course in their physics sequence...

For many years, the traditional standard text for honors introductory EM has been Purcell's E&M, Berkeley Physics Volume 2.