Dear all,

A final reminder that your final exam is 8 AM - 10:45 AM in the usual classroom. Please make sure to come prepared with the usual exam accoutrements (SB ID, pencils, pens, erasers). See you bright and early!

(And fill out course evaluations!)

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

All the lectures have been posted, all of the HW and solutions are posted, and your HW grades are available on Gradescope. In addition, the practice final is available on the course website (in the "Exams" tab, in case it wasn't clear). Let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

Read the following in its entirety.

• Your final exam is on Friday, May 13, 8 AM - 10:45 AM in the usual room.

• The final is "cumulative" but will focus primarily on material from the latter half of the course (starting Chapter 3). There are six problems, of which five will focus on material from the second half of the course. One problem is worth 30 points and the others are worth 20 points. (Of course, to understand the second half, there are aspects from the first half that you must understand!) Given that the exam is 2 hours and 45 minutes, you have plenty of time to finish. (The thought is that there is no reason to have time pressure as an extra factor.) You are welcome to leave early, but I suggest you use at least part of any extra time you may have to check your work.

• The practice final has been posted, as have its solutions, on the course website. Use it for practice, and at the very least, review the instructions on the front page, as they will be the same as on the final exam.

• I haven't had time to make a review sheet (and I don't think I promised one in view of my own time constraints), but the list of material covered on the lecture schedule should be clear.

• Office hours next week have been moved to Monday, to be held in-person. I will not hold office hours on Tuesday.

  • Monday: I will be in my office 9 AM - 12 PM and 1 PM - 6 PM, and you can feel free to show up at any time.

  • Other days: If you would like to schedule other separate office hours, or to meet over Zoom on Monday, just shoot me an e-mail and we can try to work out a time.

  • Other questions: If you don't want to deal with scheduling, you can also feel free to ask any other math/logistical questions

• Letter grades: It's always difficult as an instructor to know how the class will do on a given exam. My sense, from reading course evaluations from previous semesters and from chatting with students, is that most students have found the latter half of the course to be more abstract. Hence, a reminder that, depending upon how students do, the letter grade thresholds may be lowered, but they will never be increased from what is listed on the course website. If the average ends up being a 50% (below my expectation, but just as a hypothetical), then certainly the letter grade thresholds will be lowered. If the average is an 85% (above my expectation, but just as a hypothetical), it's unlikely the grade thresholds will be lowered.

• Please fill out your course evaluations for this course and others.

As always, questions are welcome! Good luck as finals week approaches!

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

I have not yet finished writing the practice final, but I have posted practice problems for Section 5.5, listed as "HW 13" in the homework section of the course website. You are not asked to hand in solutions, this is just study material for you (since the Final Exam may include material from Section 5.5). For this reason, I have also already posted solutions to "HW 13".

I noticed a high number of students who did not submit HW 12. Remember that the longer you wait, the higher the lateness penalty, at a rate of 2% every hour.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

Firstly, HW 9-10 grades have been posted. As always, check to make sure everything looks correct! Now onto what you want to know:

About Quiz 4:

• Your individual grade (and how the rubric applied) is available via Gradescope.

• Class statistics and approximate letter grades are available on the class website.

• The quiz and its solutions are posted to the course website.

It is worth noting that the average was about 20% lower on this quiz than on the previous two quizzes. Students performed about the same on each problem this time around. This average was lower than I expected, but I've still tried to make the letter grades reasonable. Each quiz is only 5% of the grade, so don't fret too much. In looking at the grade thresholds, this doesn't actually affect them too much. In general, students have been exceeding my expectations, so the grade thresholds have been fairly conservative. They are now just less conservative than they were before.

I will say that if you did poorly on this quiz, I highly encourage you to look at the solutions and clarify your understanding now instead of waiting to cram for the final exam (which is cumulative but will naturally focus more on material from the latter half of the course). I will say that understanding Problem 2 is a great indication that you understand the theme of Chapter 5, and no doubt that will help as we close out the semester.

As always, let me know if you have any questions. (And after a slightly rough quiz is probably the wrong time to say this, but fill out your course evaluations!)

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• Final reminder that QUIZ 4 is tomorrow during class. Please show up on time.

• HW 12 is now available. Two things to note:

  • Because I posted this a day later than usual, I have extended the deadline by one day: it is now due on Tuesday, May 3 at 7:59 PM.

  • If you saw the version posted to Gradescope before this e-mail, there was a typo (pointed out to me literally 5 minutes ago). It has since been fixed and re-uploaded.

• Solutions to HW 9-11 are available on the course website.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

We are nearing the end of the semester! In these updates, I wanted, in addition to reminding you about Quiz 4, to give you a few relevant details for the end of the semester.

• Quiz 4, covering Sections 4.1, 4.2, and 5.1, will be next week, in class, Wednesday, April 27th. As usual, please show up at 9:15 AM sharp.

• Fill out a course evaluation: https://stonybrook.campuslabs.com/eval-home/ Please feel free to make specific suggestions. I do very much read them, the good and the bad, and the more detail the better. (In particular, if you hated the course, then just writing "this class was awful" is not really helpful to me and especially not helpful to my future students - I'd much rather you tell me what could have been better.)

• Final Grades and Thresholds: Remember that "grade thresholds" are available on MAT 303. To reiterate a comment I made previously, I am expecting that these thresholds will not be lowered given how students have been performing (unless the final exam is too hard). This means that you should not be surprised by how you need to perform on the final exam in order to achieve your desired letter grade. You should especially review your grades so that you know how you're doing in the course.

• Gradescope matters: Please remember that you can not only view all of your grades on Gradescope, but you can view how the rubric was applied to each individual question. If you have any regrade request, feel free to submit it via Gradescope, and the grader for that question will be notified. If you do not hear back for more than a week, e-mail me and I will prod the grader personally. (Gradescope has a pretty decent FAQ section that you can also consult.)

• What we have left and what we won't cover: We will be covering Sections 5.2, 5.5, and 5.6, focusing on homogeneous first-order linear systems with constant coefficients. I have included after the lecture notes a set of topics which will be non-examinable, but which I think are worth reading (the missing sections of Chapter 5 and Section 6.1). I especially suggest reading Sections 5.3 and 6.1. Section 5.3 provides a geometric intuition for the methods we will see starting tomorrow in Section 5.2 (eigenvalues / eigenvectors). Section 6.1 starts a story describing that actually, that intuition from Section 5.3 further extends in the nonlinear setting, at least near equilibria. This is extremely physically relevant (c.f. Section 5.4, Section 6.3). I plan to say a few (non-examinable) words for the last lecture, just to provide some intuition.

• As always, feel free to e-mail me with any questions you may have, mathematical, logistical, or anything else you may think is relevant.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• If you're having troubles with the Mathematica workbook, please consider that:

  • My Friday, April 8 announcement explains how to use the notebook.

  • SoftWeb contains all information about downloading Mathematica and obtaining an activation key.

• If Mathematica doesn't work for you, it was only a suggestion for the homework. If you are looking for an alternative, you can use Desmos applets, e.g. Slope Field Generator (desmos.com) or Direction Field Generator (desmos.com). Notice that instead of giving dx/dt and dy/dt separately, it asks as input dy/dx. If you input (dy/dt)/(dx/dt), it's the same thing. You can then screenshot anything from Desmos and trace out solutions by hand.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• Solutions for HW 6-8 have been posted.

• Lectures are now up to date.

• The Stony Brook Math Club is hosting a "Calculus Bowl." I've attached a flyer. A description appears below my signature.

Best,

Kevin

-------

Think you're good at Calculus? Or just want to put your skills to the test? Math Club has the perfect event for you! This event will challenge your knowledge of Calculus topics ranging from derivatives to integrals to sequences and series. The event will begin with a Qualifying Quiz, from which the top 8 contenders will be identified. Then, these 8 will compete in a bracket-style tournament in elimination rounds until one Calculus Champion emerges. There will be pizza, and we will have exciting prizes for the Calculus Champion and Calculus Finalist, so don't miss out!

Dear all,

• HW 9 is due today.

• HW 10 has been posted.

• I meant to include in HW 9 a problem about justifying the assumption u_1'y_1 + u_2'y_2 = 0 in variation of parameters. I have instead written a separate file: it is posted next to Lecture 27.

• HW 6-8 grades and solutions will be posted by the end of the week.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

In addition to the lecture notes from today, I have included my Mathematica workbook that I was using to produce the figures. (They're in the usual "Lecture Schedule" portion of the website.) Mathematica is freely available to you via Softweb. In order to use the file, in the first line, just replace the first line

DE = {x*y + 1, -x^2 + y + 1};

by whatever you want your first-order (autonomous) system of differential equations to be. Namely, it should be of the form

DE = {f(x,y), g(x,y)};

where f and g are some functions for you to choose. In order to run the file, you can either click on the code and press "shift+enter", or you can go to "Evaluate > Evaluate Cells". You have to be careful - Mathematica only allows very specific input. For example, if you want to study the system

x' = cos(xy)

y' = sin(e^((x-y)/3))

then you should type in

DE = {Cos[x*y], Sin[Exp[(x-y)/3]]};

The capitalization and square brackets are important, and you have to include a * when you multiply. In general, functions are capitalized and their input must be put in square brackets. The range is set to . You can change this if you like (but you should change it in both the vector plot and the stream plot, because I wrote this quickly and didn't program it well where you can just change it in one place).

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

Quiz 3 grades are posted. Please see the course website for statistics and approximate letter grades and Gradescope for your individual grade.

See you on Friday!

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• Reminder: Quiz 3 (on Sections 3.1-3.4) is Wednesday in class. Please show up on time. The quiz will be 15 minutes.

• HW 8 is due today at 7:59 PM.

• I will post HW 9 later today.

• A reminder about office hours: I have MLC hours tomorrow 9-10 (and usually very few students show up) and office hours 1-3. They are available via my personal meeting room, which you can find here (during office hours, there will be a link at the top of the page, or you can click on "Zoom Personal Meeting" on my "card" lower down on the page). If you feel you would like more personalized attention, or those times don't work for you, you can always feel free to e-mail me.

See you on Wednesday!

Kevin

Dear all,

--------------------------

First, QUIZ 3 is Wednesday, April 6. As usual, please plan to arrive promptly at 9:15 AM to start on time.

--------------------------

Second, a few points about Gradescope which I may not have communicated clearly enough.

• All grading that has been completed so far - that is HW, Quizzes, and the Midterm - are available on Gradescope. There are a shocking number of students who have not checked any of their grades at all (c.f. my announcement on February 24), so I am reiterating that you should check your grades to make sure everything is in order. Grades for HW 1-5, Quizzes 1-2, and the Midterm have been available since my March 11 announcement.

• For each of these grades, you can see how the grader's rubric has been applied problem-by-problem. This is done on purpose - not only can you compare with posted solutions, but you can see specifically what you did incorrectly.

• If you wish to ask for a regrade, the correct way to do this would be to use Gradescope's "regrade request" feature. If you do wish to ask for a regrade, it would be optimal to do it within a week or two of your grade being posted so that the graders don't have to try to re-figure out how they went about creating their rubric. (Reiterating again: check your grades as they are posted.)

• Gradescope has very good FAQ pages. Please consult them if you have other Gradescope-specific questions. If you feel as though your questions has not been answered by these FAQ pages, feel free to e-mail me.

--------------------------

Third, a few of you were wondering about letter grades. To clarify, I have included these Grade Thresholds as a separate section on the course website. (These Grade Thresholds have been in the Syllabus since my February 4 announcement.) The difficulty of the material so far has seemed to be about right for the Grade Thresholds, so unless grades in the rest of the course go down significantly, I expect that the Grade Thresholds will be pretty accurate (i.e. they won't be lowered very much at the end of the course), so for example, if you want a B or better, you should aim for at least 80%, since it's likely that a 78 or 79% won't be enough.

--------------------------

Finally, please read these announcements. I have received many questions this semester which have been answered in the announcements. I know they are sometimes long, but the information is clearly useful -- otherwise there wouldn't be so many questions!

--------------------------

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

Just sending a reminder that HW 7 is due today. HW 8 will be posted later.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

Midterm grades and solutions have been posted on the course website. There you can also find approximate letter grades.

I have also posted HW 5 grades, though I still need to take off for late submissions or improper submissions; that will likely be done on Monday.

Enjoy your Spring Break, and see you afterwards!

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

A final reminder: the midterm is tomorrow during class. Please show up on time. Two other points to make:

• To reiterate, the password to HW Solutions posted on the course website is (SEE YOUR E-MAIL!!!).

• HW 7 is posted. Originally, I had planned to have it due on March 21, but the website said March 28. Partly out of deference to this confusion, and also because it makes sense, I have decided that HW 7 will be due on March 28, but is also a little longer (since you have almost three weeks to finish it!). It covers Sections 3.1 and 3.2. I am hoping to finish Section 3.2 on Friday, but it might be finished the Monday after Spring Break; regardless, you can already certainly get started on the first half of it, and should be almost all if not all of the second half by Friday. (You can theoretically already solve Section 3.2 #20, 36, 38 without learning anything more about Wronskians or linear independence.)

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

Last reminders:

• The midterm is on Wednesday. The exam will start at 9:15 AM on the dot, so please make sure to show up on time.

• HW 6 is due today

Materials:

• Because today's lecture ended up being mostly review, I made sure to post the lecture relatively immediately so that you can use it to study.

• I have also posted HW 5 solutions for you to also review

• I will try to have HW 7 posted by tonight so you can get a jump start on it

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

As you are aware, our midterm is on Wednesday, March 9, in class at the usual class time. The following materials have been posted under the "Exams" portion of the course website (the last tab)

• A comprehensive review sheet. Everything on the sheet is examinable, everything not on it is not.

• A practice midterm. The front page is identical to the front page of the actual midterm, except for the addition of the word "practice" in the title, so please familiarize yourself with these instructions so that you will be prepared when it comes time to take the exam.

• Solutions to the practice midterm.

I encourage you to study the review sheet over a day or two, and then attempt the practice midterm as though it were the real thing. The difficulty level of the actual midterm should be similar. Just like the practice midterm, the actual midterm consists of four problems, each graded out of 20 points for a total of 80 points. If you have any questions, please let me know.

On an unrelated note, on HW 6 Problem 2.3 #10, you should definitely use a calculator (or even WolframAlpha) to solve numerically. You should end up with an equation of the form for constants (or something similar), and you cannot write a solution in an elementary form, so you will have to use such a computational tool to solve. Apologies in advance.

Finally, your grades for HW 4 will be posted tonight.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• HW 6 has been posted. As has been done the past few times, the problems are written out in full on Gradescope.

• My office hours are always held through my personal Zoom meeting room unless we have scheduled a separate individual office hour. You can also always find a link on the "office hours" section Math Department website.

• Apologies for posting Lecture 15 late (around 10 PM on Sunday night instead of on Friday).

• On Wednesday, I will have a longer formal announcement of materials, but as you know, next Wednesday, March 9, is Midterm 1. I expect to have a practice midterm and review sheet ready for you by this Wednesday, March 2, and will send a longer e-mail. But based on how far we got today, the midterm will cover material from Chapters 1 and 2, up to today's lecture. It will not cover any material from Chapter 3 (which we start on Wednesday).

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• Solutions to HW 2-4 are now available on the course webpage. (Homework 1 Solutions had been previously posted.) They are password protected with the password (SEE YOUR E-MAIL). Please do not share this password, since there may be other universities which teach from the same textbook, or future semesters which use the same textbook.

• HW 3 Grades are now available via Gradescope. I encourage you to please check your HW grades. Whereas seeing where you made mistakes is vital to learning, more than 20 students have not viewed either their HW 1 or HW 2 grades.

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

With regards to Quiz 2:

• Grades are up on Gradescope.

• The quiz and its solutions are posted to the course website.

• Statistics for the quiz are also posted on the course website, including approximate letter grades relative to your numerical score.

I encourage you to take your quiz grades as an indication of what you may need to study. If you made a number of algebraic errors, try to see how they arose, and how you can prevent them from hindering your work in the future. If you had misunderstandings of the material, note down what you should aim to practice. Either way, there are plenty of problems in the textbook beyond those I assigned, including many with answers in the back of the book, that you can work on for supplementary review.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• Quiz 2 is on Wednesday and will be 20 minutes. Please show up promptly on time, the quiz will begin at 9:15 AM sharp. It will cover Sections 1.5 and 1.6, and will focus on the mathematical methods (solving given differential equations) as opposed to "real-world" word problems (e.g. mixture problems). (Remark: You will be expected to be able to do word problems for the midterm; a review sheet will appear before the midterm covering what you need to know.)

• HW 4 is due tomorrow (Monday) at the usual time, 7:59 PM

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

A reminder that HW 3 is due today at 7:59 PM. Please remember to assign the corresponding pages to your solutions; we will be taking points off starting with HW 3 if this has not been done. (If you submit last minute, please note that submitting a minute after the deadline is only worth 2% off, whereas not choosing pages will be worth 10% off, so it behooves you to do this.)

HW 4 is posted.

As always, feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• Quiz 1 and its solutions have been posted. I will try to get the grades available to you by the end of today, including course statistics. (If there is no further announcement, this has been achieved.)

• To clarify, HW 3 is now available both on the course website (without problems written out) as well as on Gradescope (with problems written out).

• Thank you for bearing with me as I settle on a good choice for technology for lectures. The original slides felt too rigid, and I wasn't a fan of the SMART notebook (and especially the awful stylus on the tablet in the room). I will try out one or two more options (thank you for your suggestions), and if they don't work or feel comfortable, I will go back to writing slides.

• On that note, I am planning to rewrite today's lecture with software that I'm more comfortable with, which will hopefully improve the clarity of what's written. It may take me an extra day to post them, but they will be up by tomorrow evening.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

Final reminders:

• HW 2 is due in less than an hour. Please make sure to submit it, and please assign problems to pages. If you are confused about what this means, please see this Gradescope FAQ, and especially the sections on "Submitting a PDF" or "Submitting individual images."

• QUIZ 1 will occur in class on Wednesday at 9:15 AM sharp. Please arrive on time - if you arrive late, you may miss the exam. If there are any concerns, please let me know.

Other announcements:

• Your grades for HW 1 will be available tonight.

• Solutions to HW 1 will be posted to the course website tonight.

• I will have the scans of problems for HW 3 posted to Gradescope likely tomorrow. Assuming you have the textbook (which you should), HW 3 is otherwise posted to the course website (and has been since last Friday).

As always, let me know if there are any questions or concerns about any of these announcements or any other matters with respect to the class.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• HW 3 is now posted, in case you want to get a head start (e.g. if you have finished HW 2).

• A reminder that HW 2 is due on Monday at the usual time of 7:59 PM.

• Although it's in the syllabus, I want to make it clear that quizzes will occur at the start of class, at 9:15 AM. Please show up on time on Wednesday for Quiz 1.

• I mentioned in class last week that there is an augmented version of the syllabus which notably contains grade thresholds. Feel free to give it a look, especially as you start getting grades back, e.g. when HW 1 grading and Quiz 1 grading are finished (next week). This should give you an idea of what letter grade you might expect.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• Next Wednesday is your first quiz. It will be 15 minutes and consist of two problems. The material can be from anywhere in sections 1.1-1.4 (I said 1.5 in class, but since we didn't make it so far through 1.5, I'm going to limit the scope), but will be fairly straightforward (e.g. there will be no word problems about cars skidding on ice). If you feel confident drawing slope fields and solving separable differential equations, you should be in good shape.

• As mentioned in class, next week, I am likely to switch from slides to "handwritten" (on a tablet) notes. You have been asking great questions during class, and I've found that using the slides is a little too rigid to sometimes address them properly. I will still post notes from class.

• Relatedly, if you've never tried it before, since I am providing all of the course material on my website, I encourage you to consider not taking notes during class. From personal experience, this was a daunting shift, and one I did not really try until grad school, but I found that I learned more that way. In the end, the choice is yours, but I just want to point this out.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• A reminder that HW 1 is due tonight at 7:59 PM. Please make sure that when you submit it, you match up pages to problems. We will not penalize you for HW 1, but starting HW 2, you may earn up to 10% off on your HW grade if you do not do this.

• Lecture 4 is posted. Please notice Slide 11 is new: we will discuss this on Wednesday.

• HW 2 is posted. The version posted to Gradescope (which will become available at 8 PM) includes relevant scans of questions; I may not do this in the future (starting HW 3), but in case it is taking some extra time for the textbook to arrive, I have included this for your convenience.

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Kevin

Dear all,

• As mentioned in class, to clarify HW 1 Problem 1, please write the required sentence in your Gradescope submission, not via e-mail. You can e-mail me if you require clarification on the syllabus, but you should not e-mail me that you have read the syllabus - instead, include it in your HW submission.

• Lecture 2 is posted. This is likely to be the last time I announce when a lecture is posted. (A reminder to wait 24 hours before e-mailing me to ask when the lecture will be posted - I had a meeting after class today, so I wasn't able to post it immediately.)

• In order to view the animations in class (including the one that didn't work today), please open the lectures with Adobe Acrobat Reader, available by download to all students for free. Some other PDF viewers, like Okular or FoxIt, may work, but opening it in e.g. a web browser is unlikely to work. (The animation didn't work today because of a last-minute edit I made to the slides, and I forgot to check consistency, so apologies for that. I will try to check everything beforehand in the future and will bring my laptop and HDMI cable as a workable back-up solution in the future.)

• The second slide of each set of lecture notes (the first slide after the title page) should always contain the relevant sections in the textbook. They are also listed on the "Lecture Schedule" tab of the course website. In particular, slides are posted by lecture, not by section of the textbook. If you see any inconsistency or omission of this information, then I have made a mistake and you should feel free to let me know.

• I have added an "Announcements" tab at the top of the course website, which will contain the most recent announcement, as well as a link to a separate announcements page where you can view all past announcements. This will help you if you find something valuable in these e-mail announcements but don't want to have to search through your inbox to find the required information.

• You do not need to confirm that you have received this announcement; I appreciate that you are excited to receive the information and that you have read it, but replying only serves to clog up my inbox.

As always, feel free to e-mail me with any questions that you may have. (Two of these items were in response to e-mails I received from students, so thank you for those questions - they are helping pin down logistical details for the course.)

See you Friday!

Kevin

Dear all,

Thank you already for the handful of e-mails I received about the class - to reiterate the first announcement I sent, please feel free to e-mail me with any questions you may have.

Two things:

• Lecture 1 is now posted to the course website, under the section heading "Lecture Schedule." If it does not appear, you may need to refresh the page. In general, I plan to post lectures relatively immediately after class (except possibly on Fridays since I have a meeting). They are unlikely to be posted before class since it would counteract any attempt to have active off-the-cuff participation. In the future, if the lecture does not appear by midnight of the day the lecture was given, please feel free to let me know by e-mail. (This will also motivate me to post them in a timely manner, since a sudden barrage of e-mails is never in my wish list.)

• Homework 1 is available both on the course website (under the "Homework" heading) as well as on Gradescope. I had forgotten to select the setting which made the PDF for Homework 1 downloadable via Gradescope. Homework will always be posted in both places.

See you on Wednesday!

Kevin

Dear all,

As you aware, tomorrow is the beginning of the Spring semester, so welcome back! I hope you've had an enjoyable winter break. Before tomorrow's class, I just wanted to send an announcement regarding the logistics of this class. Please read this message in its entirety.

Main Course Website: located at this hyperlink.

Gradescope: You will be using Gradescope to submit homework assignments, and it is where grades will appear. You should have received an e-mail stating that you are enrolled in the course. If you did not (or you registered late), please add yourself using the Entry Code: N8DG6G.

Submitting HW: You must submit solutions which are legible. Gradescope also allows you, when you submit, to match up your homework responses part by part. Please do this - it takes one minute on your end, and saves the TAs a ton of time when grading.

Blackboard will not be used for the rest of this course, aside from this single announcement and a posted copy of the syllabus. (Future announcements will be sent directly via e-mail.) The reason is two fold: Gradescope is much more TA-friendly for grading purposes, whereas my website is much more student-friendly for searching for where materials are posted. (Hopefully you will agree.)

Homework 1 is posted and due Monday, January 31. It covers material from pretty much only what will be the first lecture.

Attendance: Although attendance is not mandatory, it is a crucial part to understanding the material, so you should try to attend as much as possible. Furthermore, I will be trying out a few methods to encourage active participation.

Other logistical points: I believe pretty much everything else should be elucidated by the syllabus, though feel free to e-mail me (see the next line) if there is a point you believe needs clarification.

GENERAL RULE FOR THE CLASS: If you have any questions, at any time, please e-mail me (kevin.sackel@stonybrook.edu).

See you all tomorrow morning at 9:15 AM!

Kevin