18.01A/18.02A - Fall 2008

18.01A/18.02A (first half) Syllabus

(Adobe Acrobat -- pdf file)

Problem Set 1

(Adobe Acrobat -- pdf file)

In addition to the textbook (Simmons, 2nd ed.), you will need the 18.01A Supplementary Notes, which can be purchased at Copy Tech, in the basement of Building 11, starting Wed. Sept.3. (These differ from the regular 18.01 Notes also on sale there by the addition of 24 pages on Probability.)

Lecturer

Arthur Mattuck 2-241 3-4345 apm@math.mit.edu or mattuck@mit.edu

Recitation Teachers: Offices, Hours

Admission to 18.01A

You must present any one of the following. The records of all students who register for 18.01A will be checked during the first few weeks; those who do not present one of these admission criteria will have to drop back to 18.01, regardless of how they have been doing in 18.01A -- sorry. The reason is that 18.01A omits without a review most of the AB topics (roughly, all of differentiation, and elementary integration) and therefore it is fair to ask that students present evidence they have already mastered them.

1. A score of 4 or 5 on the AB Advanced Placement test, or an AB subscore of 4 or 5 on the BC test
2. An equivalent score on the A-level or the IB exam.
3. An equivalent grade in a college calculus subject with syllabus comparable to the AB syllabus. (You must present a college transcript and a copy of the syllabus.)
4. A passing grade on Part I of the M.I.T. 18.01 Advanced Placement exam, given during R/O week. A practice exam and solutions are given by the links:

Practice Exam for Admission to 18.01A

(Adobe Acrobat -- pdf file)

Solutions to above Practice Exam

(Adobe Acrobat -- pdf file )

M.I.T. Advanced Placement Exam for 18.01

This exam has two parts.

Part I (90 minutes) is the Exam for Admission to 18.01A, like the practice exam given above; it covers the AB syllabus.

Part II (90 minutes, given immediately afterwards) covers some additional topics in 18.01 on the BC syllabus: linear and quadratic approximation, mean-value theorem, further techniques and applications of integration, polar coordinates, parametric equations, L'Hospital's rule, improper integrals, convergence of certain infinite series (geometric series, series whose n-th term gets small like the reciprocal of a fixed k-th power of n, where k is a positive number.)

Part II will not cover the following BC syllabus topics, since they are not included in 18.01: solving first-order differential equations graphically and numerically, second-order differential equations with constant coefficients; ratio test for infinite series.

Note:

If you want to AP 18.01 by taking the MIT exam, you must take both parts of the exam described above, even if you satisfy one of the other admissions criteria given above for 18.01A.

Stellar

We are not using Stellar this semester. A link to Grade Management is being prepared as a substitute, to use for changing recitation, and checking your record on problem sets and exams.