Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video]

#61

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Feb 14, 2017, 1:42 PM UTC

datainplace wrote: post #4

Now I know someone is browsing my Youtube history and posting to HN. Youtube really is the math teacher I never had. Probability Models and Axioms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9WZyLZCBzs The Exponential Function https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo1ZZlvT2LQ&t=100s Vector Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozwodzD5bJM&t=36s Tree cutting fails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHZkR6UVegY

I take more pride/pleasure by understanding through reading. Somehow I don't trust my brain not to go into a visual form of rote learning by replicating what the video said.

Books are a bit more painful, but forces my brain to actually make sense of abstractions actively instead of passively (which is not always the case on videos, but a lot more probable).

Also, libraries are a good place to reflect.

Re: Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video]

#62

Post by shaftway » Tue, Feb 14, 2017, 11:19 PM UTC

Honestly I couldn't slog through the video. It started off with "let's use letters" and immediately got to things like "the right letters for this case are 'df' and 'dt'". This just feels like "here's a bunch of magic that you'll just have to memorize". Reminds me of my favorite quote:

> And then Satan said "put the alphabet in math".

When I learned the basics of calculus it was via simple problems that we wanted to answer. And for a while we estimated the answers by brute forcing approximations. I still drop back to this when I can't remember how to do something and need to re-discover parts of calculus.

Re: Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video]

#63

Post by effie » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #38

Having had a non-traditional route through learning various math topics, I'd like to advocate the teaching of calculus (the understanding of the accumulation of infinitesimally-small changes) before the teaching of trigonometry (the relationships between different geometric shapes, and the resulting association with waves). In my (humbly biased) opinion, it's easier to learn how trigonometric concepts operate with a…

> it's easier to learn how trigonometric concepts operate with a calculus background

I can't imagine what this means, could you give an example? Which trigonometric concepts?