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MACM 201

justinbh2
in General
Hi All,

Its been a while since I have posted, but I have a question. It has been a number of years since I have taken MACM 101 and now wish to take MACM 201. I imagine that I will be rusty on the core 101 topics, but how important is this for MACM 201?

Does anyone recommend I simply go over MACM 101 topics for about a month and afterwards simply enroll? or just do the course over again? I did reasonably well with the first course. Any advice is appreciated.

Comments

  • justinbh2
    edited January 2016
    I gathered some data on this and will post a response to my own question. Hopefully others find this useful:

    Courtesy of laurak95 over at reddit

    "

    I think the professor you have might affect the way the content is covered a bit. I took this class with Luis Goddyn, for reference, also, I took MACM 101 with Binay Bhattacharya.

    Counting, Probability, Set Theory: I found this to be completely review from MACM 101 and I don't think a review before the class would really be necessary. However, the ideas---particularly Binomial Theorem and Lattice Walks---are important for later material in the class.

    Inclusion/Exclusion: The main material you need to understand it from MACM 101 is reviewed prior to this section (counting, probability, set theory).

    Generating Functions, Recursion: In general, the better math intuition you have I think the easier these will be to get through. Recursion was covered briefly in my MACM 101 class, but perhaps you are familiar with the idea from CS as well. Binomial Theorem is very important, but it should be covered within 201. Ideas from calculus like intuition about functions and sequences/series are useful... we also used differentiation to establish some things but there was an alternate way to establish it. I had already taken Differential Equations so I found it easy to catch onto the solution methods for recursive functions since they were very similar.

    Graph Theory: Here, I would say review the material on proofs. My prof did go through how to construct proofs for graph theory, but I think it would be best to be fairly comfortable with general proof techniques going into the section. This section is mostly all reading theorems/proofs and proving things.

    I like this book for proofs: http://www.amazon.ca/How-Think-Like-Mathematician-Undergraduate/dp/052171978X

    "


    https://www.reddit.com/r/simonfraser/comments/3b4vjh/macm_201_after_not_taking_101_in_a_long_time/

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