call for guinea pigs

Dec 05, 2012 15:55

As I've mentioned recently, I'm trying to write an undergraduate abstract algebra textbook that's readable by humans,1 because I think that somebody should.

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autopope December 5 2012, 16:05:20 UTC
Your "what level have you studied to" is missing a few options.

Ex: I did a Maths O-level in 1981. I gather it covered stuff that's A-level today. I then took supplementary courses that covered some elements of the 1981-period A level syllabus (I was doing Physics), and then more at university, then yet more on a different university course (and where exactly do they start first order predicate calculus these days?).

So I have no idea what level I've studied mathematics to.

Oh, and I've forgotten how to do long division ...

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fishrgreat December 5 2012, 16:15:46 UTC
For that matter I studied further maths at A Level, and my first year engineering MEng covered a lot more maths, plus some very mathsy stuff in transformations etc as we went through signal processing and quantum mechanics (bleh)

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makyo December 5 2012, 16:15:51 UTC
Yes, I realised after I'd posted it that that question wasn't terribly useful or helpful. I guess what I'm really trying to ask is whether respondents have heard of, briefly met or studied in detail the concepts in question, so (as is often the case) educational qualifications are perhaps not the best way to judge that. I'll try to quickly swap in a poll without that question.

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makyo December 5 2012, 17:46:33 UTC
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure what's actually in the GCSE or A-level syllabuses these days. I was the second year to do GCSE, so the syllabus was pretty much the same as O-level but in a slightly more readable font. And I did A-level (maths and further maths) some years before modularisation came in, and was taught by teachers who threw loads of extra stuff in because it was interesting and they knew we could cope with it. Occasionally my first-year students say things like "We did complex numbers, but it's only in FP3 so not everyone did it" and I nod sagely as if I know what they're talking about.

We teach the first year students a bit of symbolic logic (truth tables and the like) in the first term "Foundations" module, and there's an optional "Introduction to Logic" module run by the philosophy department that the maths students traditionally do quite well at.

I can do long division with polynomials, but it's probably a couple of decades since I last did it with numbers.

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dougs December 5 2012, 22:47:29 UTC
> I can do long division with polynomials, but it's probably a couple of decades since I last did it with numbers.

Doing long division with numbers is easy.

Step 1: let x=10
Step 2: do long division with polynomials.

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