As much as Luke Skywalker loved his time in math he had always known something was wrong... His math abilities grew and grew, but he always felt that the methods of teaching were a constraint on his ability to really understand the mathematics being taught. When he had grown old enough he finally met Obiwan Kenobee who told him that he was meant to be a math master and that the slight force he had always felt would eventually become one with him and he would understand all. Obiwan explained to him that all of this would begin with the destruction of the old math empire... In the next year Luke created a calculus program on computer and began slowly defeating the dark side of math that had always haunted him. As time went on he transfered all the mathematics the rest of the world could comprehend on to a computer and defeated the empire of long boring lectures and unnecessary computation. The force prevailed and true mathematics finally came through.
You may be wondering just who I am, so please allow me to tell you a little about myself. I am currently a graduate student in organic chemistry at Caltech. I received my BS in chemistry from the U of I in 1994 andI took all of my Calculus classes with C&M. When I came out of the C&M courses, I was worried that advanced math and chemistry would be very difficult because of the way that I had taken my previous classes. And to be honest, some of the other classes may "seem" a little more difficult, but the reason is probably not what you might think. C&M stresses the concepts of the mathematics more than the actual mechanics of calculation. What this means is that when you walk away from C&M and head out into more advanced classes you have an understanding of the meaning behind the math, you know what the integrals mean, not just how to calculate them by hand. This is extremely important to a chemist, because most of the types of problems that we try to calculate are not amenable to doing by hand. In a typical quantum chemistry course, you learn how to calculate the exact solution to the Schrodinger equation by hand. (The Schrodinger equation is used to calculate, among other things, the electron distributions of molecules and give the pretty pictures of orbitals that you see in your general chemistry textbook). The funny thing is that for the most part you can only solve the equation exactly for all but the simplest of molecules (such as H2). Anything more complicated (i.e. most of chemistry) cannot be solved exactly. How do we get around this? We use numerical approximations and we solve the many easy to set up,but complicated to calculate, equations using computers.
Techs support both the lab machines and the software used in this program.
In the event of a problem, send an e-mail to tech@cm.math.uiuc.edu.