(no subject)
Dear math_help,
I'm a college sophomore who wiled away my freshman year with pleasant Literature, Philosophy and History courses. I took calc in high school, but in the last year I managed to forget pretty much everything I knew. Well, this semester I decided that it was time to get my thinking skills back in serious shape, so I signed up for Math 115: "applications of integration, with some formal techniques and numerical methods. Improper integrals, approximation of functions by polynomials, infinite series," which I envisioned as a sort of intellectual boot-camp for my humanities-addled brain. It's barely the second class of the semester, and I'm already having trouble. We're starting off with the fundamental theorem of calculus, and I'm doing an okay job at applying it for practice problems, but no matter how many times I read my textbook's proof and explanation, I just can't get my brain around what exactly it's trying to tell me. Would anyone be willing to take a shot at explaining why the FTC is so important and what exactly it does in a way that might help me grasp it more intuitively?
PS: this guy's my professor. I get the impression that he has never met a math problem that didn't agree with him, learned this material in 9th grade, and finds me to be an imbecile :).
I'm a college sophomore who wiled away my freshman year with pleasant Literature, Philosophy and History courses. I took calc in high school, but in the last year I managed to forget pretty much everything I knew. Well, this semester I decided that it was time to get my thinking skills back in serious shape, so I signed up for Math 115: "applications of integration, with some formal techniques and numerical methods. Improper integrals, approximation of functions by polynomials, infinite series," which I envisioned as a sort of intellectual boot-camp for my humanities-addled brain. It's barely the second class of the semester, and I'm already having trouble. We're starting off with the fundamental theorem of calculus, and I'm doing an okay job at applying it for practice problems, but no matter how many times I read my textbook's proof and explanation, I just can't get my brain around what exactly it's trying to tell me. Would anyone be willing to take a shot at explaining why the FTC is so important and what exactly it does in a way that might help me grasp it more intuitively?
PS: this guy's my professor. I get the impression that he has never met a math problem that didn't agree with him, learned this material in 9th grade, and finds me to be an imbecile :).