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by athrowaway12 1291 days ago
Yeah, [edit: I doubt this]. I have a degree in math and cs. It sounds like parent comment doesn't really know analysis. The exercises in Rudin 1 are way harder than memorizing some rules to evaluate integrals. [Edit: at least for me; and I've never heard someone say the opposite before.]

At least for American university-level calculus vs. American university-level analysis/topology over metric spaces.

> self-taught

Ah, makes more sense. I am also mostly self taught for most math. From my experience, I find it hard to believe after you did the exercises in PoMA, that calculus was harder.
1 comments
larve 1291 days ago
That's how I remember it. I know I had to take calculus twice, but passed analysis the first time. To be fair, this is 20+ years ago and my memory sucks at the best of times.

Looking at it now, I think maybe I just found it too boring to remember the tricks, and too tedious to not make mistakes, while I found coming up with proofs more "interesting" and requiring less rote memorization.

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athrowaway12 1291 days ago
Ah, for sure pure math is much more enjoyable to learn. I'm glad you find math interesting. Especially as a writer; that's really cool. Sorry for my previous comment.

I wish the university calculus changed the curriculum. I didn't find it particularly useful to learn how to integrate e.g. inverse trig given that WolframAlpha exists. There are lots of other examples of teaching memorization of silly tricks like that. I guess they probably do it because it's easy to test.

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larve 1291 days ago
No offense taken, I totally understand that it can come across as odd. I hope my clarification makes more sense. Once I learned more about say, why leibniz and newton came up with their formulations, and what say, the inverse of the square root of the determinant of the jacobian actually allows one to formulate (how a space "dilate" when a continuous distortion is applied to it, for example), calculus (applied calculus) became a much more interesting topic for me.

While I only got so far in proving stuff about a cyber-physical I was working on, but this was really fun to learn: https://github.com/LS-Lab/KeYmaeraX-release

See also: http://lfcps.org/lfcps/

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