Academic Year 2021 - 2022
Semester 1

NUSMods Description

This module provides a basic foundation for calculus and its related subjects required by computing students. The objective is to train the students to be able to handle calculus techniques arising in their courses of specialization. In addition to the standard calculus material, the course also covers simple mathematical modeling techniques and numerical methods in connection with ordinary differential equations. Major topics Preliminaries on sets and number systems. Calculus of functions of one variable and applications. Sequences, series and power series. Functions of several variables. Extrema. First and second order differential equations. Basic numerical methods for ordinary differential equations.

Review

This module was taught by Prof Chan Heng Huat who is actually a number theory professor. All of us, including himself, were confused as to why he was assigned to teach this module. This prof, is a blessing. He is the most caring professor I have met and he always displays passion whenever he teaches. His lectures are twice a week from 6pm - 8pm.

There is a tendency for students to already be tired at that period but he really puts in the effort to get everyone engaged. He is very patient is taking questions even if they can be repetitive but he makes sure we understand the concepts well.

As mentioned above, there were 2 lectures on Wednesday and Friday, both at 6pm - 8pm. Tutorial classes were all conducted by him. He refused to hire TAs as he was worried they are not good enough. What a beast.

There is a weekly graded quiz of 5 questions every week and 3 tests. All were manageable, especially for me with a H2 Further Math / H3 Math background. What I was frustrated about (with my cohort), is that there were a lot of cheating cases which was infuriating. It made me put in more effort than I had planned on this module to be ahead of the bell curve. I appreciate how the professor handled the situation though. After I heard about the cheating cases, it strengthed my resolve to destroy those cheaters in the tests no matter what.

I found this module to be of light workload and easy. I did the tutorials, quizzes and exams pretty fast and I also did quite well. I think people tend to struggle with tests of convergence for series and sequences, and double/triple integrals. Having learnt them before, it was a breeze for me.