The rest of the semester

First, I'd like to inform you that I intend to be back lecturing on Monday, November 3. (Whether that is good news or bad news depends on the student.) My recovery is going more or less as expected, and I think I'll have sufficient stamina next week to give the lectures.

I am very grateful to those who substituted for me for the previous seven lectures, for I could not give them myself. Were other things equal, I would have preferred to do it myself (and would have been expected to, of course).

I find the material from the last two weeks to be pretty straightforward, and I believe that students find it likewise on the whole. If you disagree, let me know how and why, for I don't have ESP. You may find the necessary condition for P(x,y)i + Q(x,y)j to be a gradient, the method of "partial integration", and the role of simple connectedness in the sufficiency of the condition to be a little obscure; these will feed into the material of Weeks 10 and 11, just before the sky starts falling. Also, the new technique of integration in two (or more) variables called switching the order of integration (without being ordered by someone else to do it), which is getting added to your repertory, should get to be on the same footing as, say, making a substitution in one-variable integrals.

The course will be slowing down for the last four weeks of the course. You may not notice it, for the material becomes more difficult; indeed, that is why the pace slows down. The level of that material necessitates more effort by the student, not a surrender to despair.

I give high grades and low grades according to the performance of the student.
Students determine the data; all I do is process it.

Steven Zucker Oct 31, 2003.