Wednesday, September 25, 2013

An Empowering Experience

The current course I'm taking for my master's degree is Probability Theory, and our instructor pointed out early on that it's a "calculus-based" probability theory course.

One part of the lesson I watched last night involved calculating a definite integral; the instructor skipped the intermediate steps, said something like "you can confirm this with u-substitution", wrote the answer, and moved on.  Today I decided I needed to review u-substitution and integration by parts, as it's been a few decades.  I got a calculus book and got to work reviewing, and after a few minutes decided to try last night's problem.  Before starting, though, I called up a couple of my stats students who either have taken or are concurrently taking calculus, and asked them to make sure I didn't make any mistakes in the process.

While I solved the problem correctly, I think they enjoyed my soliciting their "help".

5 comments:

  1. PeggyU10:53 AM

    I like puzzles. Share the problem?

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  2. No puzzle, just something I hadn't done since Reagan was president. It was integrating (1-x)^4 over the interval [0,1].

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  3. PeggyU11:05 PM

    Oh, ok.

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  4. Anonymous9:20 PM

    uv - int (v,du)!

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  5. No factorials involved :)

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