Honors Calculus II
Announcements
Announcements will be posted here from time to time. Please check regularly. The most recent announcement(s) will always be in green.
- Solutions to the final exam are available.
Lecturer
K. Brown, Malott 521, 5-3598, kbrown@cornell.edu, office hours Monday 2:00-3:00, Friday 2:30-3:30, and by appointment.
See the course and room roster for class meeting times and places.
Teaching assistant
Ho Hon Leung, 5-7548, hohonleung@math.cornell.edu, office hours Tuesday 3:00-4:00 and Wednesday 4:00-5:00 in Malott 218.
Course mailing list
Mail sent to math122@math.cornell.edu will reach everyone in the class (including the teaching staff). We will use this for announcements, but students can also use it for questions of general interest, discussion, etc.
Course description
This is the honors version of Math 112. The prerequisite is high performance in Calculus I. Topics include methods of integration, applications of integrals, first order differential equations, parametric curves, polar coordinates, infinite sequences and series, power series, and complex numbers, as well as an introduction to proving theorems.
What does honors mean?
- The course is theoretical, with some proofs.
- There will be some challenging homework problems; you won't always see instantly how to solve them.
- You will spend more time on this course than in a typical non-honors course.
- We will go fast.
- I will expect you to read the book; I won't repeat everything.
Text
Robert A. Adams, Calculus: Single Variable, 6th ed., 2006. The publisher maintains a website with student resources.
The course will cover Sections 5.5-5.6, 6.1-6.3, 6.5-6.6, 7.1-7.3, 7.9, 8.2-8.6, 9.1-9.8, 17.7, and Appendix I. See the syllabus for more details.
Exams
Prelim 1, Tuesday, September 25,
7:30pm, Malott 406.
Prelim 2, Thursday, October 25, 7:30pm,
Malott 406.
Final exam, Thursday, December 6,
2:00-4:30pm, Malott 406.
Please check the prelim dates in your other courses and let me know as soon as possible if you have conflicts. The usual solution in such cases is to give the exam early or late on the scheduled evening.
Projects
You may optionally do a project. This involves learning about some mathematical topic and writing an expository paper at a level that your classmates could understand. The grade on the project will be averaged in with your exam grades as explained below. See the projects page for more details.
Homework
Homework is due on Thursdays at 3:00pm and will include material covered in lecture on the previous Tuesday; see the syllabus. It may be turned in during lecture or at my office. Due to constraints on our resources, not all problems will be graded.
Solutions will be posted on Thursday afternoons, shortly after the homework is due.
The homework is the most important part of the course. Most of your learning will take place while doing it if you approach it with the right attitude.
I will not accept late homework except in very unusual circumstances. I will, however, drop the lowest homework grade.
You should start attempting the problems as soon as possible after the material is presented in lecture. Please don't save it all for the night before it is due.
When problems call for explanations, please write carefully, using good English and complete sentences. See the top of the syllabus for more detailed instructions.
Working together
I have no objection in principle to collaboration on the homework, provided that it is done in a way that maximizes the benefit of the homework to all people involved. (One person simply telling another how to do a problem totally defeats the purpose of the problem.) It is my opinion that you get maximum benefit from a homework problem if you work hard on it alone before combining your ideas with someone else's. In any case, the paper that you turn in with your name on it should represent your own solutions, written in your own words, regardless of whether you arrived at some of those solutions in collaboration with others.
In particular, you may not simply copy someone else's homework and turn it in as your own. This will be treated as a violation of Cornell's Academic Integrity Code. Similarly, copying solutions that you might find on the internet or in some other source is illegal.
Academic integrity
I take academic integrity very seriously and will follow university procedures in all cases of suspected cheating. Details are spelled out in the Academic Integrity Handbook, cited above.
There is anecdotal evidence that quite a bit of cheating occurs on campus. In an effort to prevent one common form of cheating, I will xerox a random sample of exam books before returning them.
Grading
Your grade will be based on the the prelims (25% each), the final (30%), and a section grade, including homework (20%). If you choose to do a project, then the grading will be adjusted so that the prelims count 20% each, the final counts 25%, and the project counts 15%.
I rarely give incompletes, and then only to people who have a passing grade on a substantial part of the course but have a good reason (usually medical) for being unable to complete the requirements.