Your Hardest Undergraduate Course

[eumyang]

This thread reminds me of something else I've read:

It's been claimed that Math 55 at Harvard is the most difficult math undergraduate class in the country (link)

I've also read somewhere that the difficulty of MATH 20700-20800-20900 (Honors Analysis in Rn I-II-III) at the University of Chicago is close to, or on par with, Math 55.

 

[WannabeNewton]

I would personally say more so with regards to UChicago's honors analysis (mainly because of the pace).

 

[lurflurf]

This thread reminds me of something else I've read:

It's been claimed that Math 55 at Harvard is the most difficult math undergraduate class in the country (link)

I've also read somewhere that the difficulty of MATH 20700-20800-20900 (Honors Analysis in Rn I-II-III) at the University of Chicago is close to, or on par with, Math 55.

Math 55 is intended for freshman and MATH 20700-20800-20900 is intended for sophomores so it is an unfair comparison.

 

[atyy]

Discrete maths was hardest for me. I wanted to learn about how CDs work and so thought Reed-Solomon coding would be interesting. Till this day I have no idea how anyone could think of such things.

The other thing which still gets me every time is why the wheel's relative velocity is zero in rolling without slipping.

 

[DimReg]

Math 55 is intended for freshman and MATH 20700-20800-20900 is intended for sophomores so it is an unfair comparison.

Not quite true: About 50% of Honors Analysis students are freshman. It is entirely intended to be a freshman course, however the understanding is that the students knowledge far exceeds the typical freshman.

 

[TomServo]

Math 55 is for students who started calculus in their early teens and went to high schools where they had taken linear algebra and diffy qs and maybe discrete math already. At my high school I think calc was the highest math class. It was only 600 students and most of them were urban rednecks, so even having calc was kind of a joke at that school.

 

[deskswirl]

That sounds brutal. Is that the norm for all linear control classes or was it the professor?

Mainly just the professor. Asked him if we would be needing a second textbook halfway through the course and he just laughed. I think he was trying to fit two semesters of material in one - because that's "how it was" when he took the course 40 years ago.

BTW, Basically for our midterm we were to model the Rossler system (3 coupled nonlinear DEs) and given absolutely no directions on what was expected. In his words, "I just want to see how far you can get."