[dgacmu]

That's the one! It was a very nice example. I suspect for some students they could ignore the physics, but daughter needed to walk through the physical interpretation of the components before getting into the math.

From my perspective as a tutor, it was a good use of time (gotta learn it some day anyway, and it provides useful physical intuition throughout life), but I could see it causing frustration if someone just wanted to learn algebra or didn't have a resource to turn to.

(Love those books. I went and asked all of my colleagues who had won teaching awards, what books they recommended, and all of them said aops)

[arjvik]

I owe a great deal of my mathematical maturity to going through nearly every AoPS book published in middle and high school :)