TLDR:

• Be comfortable with Math
• Labs take a lot of effort and time

This is a course review of MATH2107 - Linear Algebra II taken at CarletonU in the summer of 2022. The course took a “reverse-style” classroom teaching where the lectures were pre-recorded and students were expected (but was optional) to attend lectures to solve problems relating to the lectures. The tutorials were also in-person. The review will be split into two main sections, a long commentary about what the course is about and a section dedicated to reviewing and discussing the organization of the course and how I studied for the course.

When the semester ends I often scan my notes but it has always been a huge pain to scan large amounts of papers. A few months ago my brother was telling me how he scan his old notes and introduced me to the document feeder where you can place your notes into the feeder and all the pages will be scanned automatically. This amazed me because I’ve been painstakingly scanning each page individually, scanning the same paper twice but on a different face (side).

In my previous blog post discussing about double angles and its relation with matrix rotations, I explored Manim Python Library to animate math. Instead of catching up in a course I am supposed to be self studying (I assured the prof I would by the end of summer but not going so well), I’ve been fiddling with a few projects over the past 2 weeks. Below is a preview of one of the projects I have been working on (there’s no sound and is simply a preview, I still need to edit the script, adjust the timing of each frame, and record the voice):

Closures are very neat and are similar to Javascript’s arrow functions or anonymous functions in other languages. The neat thing about closures is the ability to capture the environment or take a snapshot of the state of the environment within its scope (i.e. the environment outside the closure but within the scope it is defined in).

A while back I decided to pick up Math Girls by Hiroshi Yuki and one of the topics is about rotations (only 2 pages in fact is dedicated to rotation). The author describes one method of deriving double angle formula through rotations and it’s a very simple and elegant illustration of the power of rotation but does require elementary exposure to linear algebra.