Master_Ghost_Knight
New Member
It is just natural; librarians usually are people with an education in literature and not science and mathematics.Zylstra said:I went to the local library to ask about that....
the 'librarian' seemed very confused :roll:
You are not seriously considering self tutoring this stuff are you? This is college level stuff; most people rather get electrocuted then to go through all this.Zylstra said:Well, that sucks. If it's as important as you say, though, i don't have much choice if I want to understand any of this stuff. Noq, what level of math *(calc, trig, etc) do i need to make sure to master before delving into this?
It is better that you really get some professional education.
Anyways the books when addressed in order are good to build up from the bottom of a college level math, basic mathematical skills are important (including but not limited to calculus and trigonometry). However if my memory doesn't trick me the book introducing to Real Analysis is going to build you up from 1+1 to what you need on any subject, and it includes smacking down the wrong notion that general students come out of high school whit. Basically your real contact with what really is math starts there. That book it will then take you to a trip to recursive additions on to series and special results (basically teach you how to use those weird E look alike operators that are really neat to simplify allot of stuff, oh and the popular proof of 0.99999999999"¦=1 is there to I believe), then it will start to get into differential/integration analysis and how to use those tools (perhaps the most important) and finally I believe there is some topology as well (fields, divergence, rotational, flux).
The Linear Algebra is also an accessible content to some one that is just starting, if you take that conjointly with introduction to analysis won't hurt you. It will teach you allot of valuable tool s that will appear several times, such as matrix operations, linear transformations, notions like dimension, nullity and so on.
The complex analysis is the next logically step after the previous 2, it requires several notions found in the previous, it will teach you how to move around with complex numbers, it will have some more topology and it will dive back into some results for differential/integration analysis and some special results like the theorem of residues (useful to solve some forms of singularities).
Finally there is the differential equations (which relates functions with their derivatives like an equation), going to trivial solution to particular solution and several methods of solving particular problems.
I don't remember very well the total extent of the content of each book but I guess that was it. And I guess it is more the enough to build you from the ground up if you don't get lost in the middle of the ocean.
Good Luck!