Further Adventures as a Student: MST121, MS221 and M255

Back in September of last year, I started studying part-time, for a BSc in Maths, with some computing thrown in. It's now six months since I made that first post, and this is a really, really busy phase of the degree course, so I thought it might be time for an update.

A Second Cheat Sheet: the Sine Rule and the Cosine Rule

More adventures in MST121: Using Mathematics. B3: Modelling with Vectors took an unexpected turn into matters of triangle geometry - and not the more beginner-friendly right-angled variety either - which left me getting to grips with the Sine Rule and the Cosine Rule.

Much like my experiences with Sigma Notation, the principles are straightforward, but I kept failing to spot which equations to apply.

So I've knocked up a further cheat sheet. Here are the files:

• PDF Document
• LaTeX Source

Sigma Notation Cheat Sheet

I'm just over a quarter of the way through MST121: Using Mathematics, which I started back in September. My impression is that it's starting to get tougher, but it may just be that my mind has been elsewhere.

One concept with which I found myself to be less confident is Sigma Notation. The principle itself is fairly straightforward (it's kind of like a for loop, if you ask me) but getting actual numbers out of the other side was another matter.

The problem was that I was consistently failing to spot the patterns that indicate that you can substitute in other, hopefully simpler, expressions. So I made a little aide memoire to print out. It covers the three four initial, erm, refactorings that have cropped up, and I figured I may as well share it.

I'm a Student Again

So it turns out that as of now, I'm once again a student, this time with the Open University.

Strictly speaking, the course kicks off this coming Saturday, but since I'll be in the pub from lunchtime onwards that day, and since they sent all the materials through a couple of weeks ago, I felt it might be worth cracking on.