Member-only story
Starting with every problem from Spivak’s Calculus
I’ve been writing in other posts about what I’ve studied since having quit my job a year ago and focusing most of my time on taking courses online (mainly MIT OCW but sometimes others) in STEM.
I studied Calculus in college more than ten years ago. Then last year I took it again from MIT OCW, 18.01 Single-variable calculus. I then proceeded to take more courses from MIT OCW: 18.02 Multivariable Calculus, 18.03 Differential Equations, 8.01 Classical Mechanics, and then I started 8.02 Electromagnetism.
I noticed that the beginning of 8.02 was basically two laws, Coulomb’s law and Gauss’ law, and then a whole lot of actual usage of most of what was learned in Calculus. By “actual usage” I mean in problems with physical interpretations, where you’re not just computing the result of a definite integral of some sort, or finding the value of some derivative at some specific point. You have to form the integral or derivative or whatever calculation based on some understanding about some underlying system. It’s a different type of thought process.
I opened two more advanced books, Purcell’s Electricity and Magnetism and Griffiths’ Electrodynamics. The latter has a first chapter that focuses on the math you will need for the book, and there is an appendix…
