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Unread 19-10-2010, 01:37
AustinSchuh AustinSchuh is offline
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Re: Motivating Students

Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat View Post
Let me ask you older people, what in the world would I use pre calculus stuff like Graphing and analyzing a polynomial equation in my life? Yes, I am very unmotivated in that class...
(I had this typed up before Eric responded, so I'll post it as well)

Here's a couple pre-calculus things I've been using recently in my controls classes. Some of the applications might be a bit too archaic, but will show that the ideas have a use.

Partial Fraction Expansion. Useful for going from the laplace domain back to the time domain when modeling control systems and their responses. Also useful for evaluating lots of nasty integrals. I've been surprised how often I keep using this basic principle.

Assuming you are talking about factoring polynomials and figuring out if a polynomial has an imaginary solution or not, I regularly factor polynomials for partial fraction expansion, and also to figure out how control systems respond to step inputs. The roots of the denominator and numerator of something like (s + 5) / ((s + 3) (s + 4)) have a very special meaning, and are very important to find. Also, if a polynomial has imaginary roots, the step response of the system will have sin and cos terms.

I'm not sure if you have been introduced to matrices, but those are incredibly powerful. They show up all over the place.

To echo Eric, this stuff is all throughout Engineering text books.

Hopefully my examples have given you a little insight as to how some of the stuff you are learning gets used at a higher level. As cliche as it finds, I haven't found much math that I haven't used again at a higher level in both.

Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat
In fact I had to correct her on lectures sometimes...
That will never change. We routinely catch errors in what the prof is teaching here at Berkeley. It's normally that he made a math error, or flipped a minus sign, or things like that, but that never goes away. Nobody is perfect, and if the prof isn't making errors, he is probably just reading off of notes, which makes for a more boring lecture than normal ones.
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