Course Information - MATH 2451 - SPRING 2006

• Contact: V. Ramakrishna, EC 3.906

• Classroom and Hours : Tuesdays and Thursdays 5.30-6.45 pm, CN 1.102
• Campus Extension: 6873; email: vish@utdallas.edu
• Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 4-5 pm and/or by Ap-
pointment. Students are welcome to use other times to meet me.
But to avoid potential conflicts they should i) send me an email exactly a
day in advance; ii) if wishing to meet me on Mondays leave voicemail (not
email) for me on the Sunday before at my campus extension (6873). Both
the email and voicemail message must tell me how to get a hold of them in
case I am unable to make the meeting.
• Teaching Assistant(s) in Charge of the Problem Session: Mr. Hong Zhou.
The TA will give you his coordinates and office hours in the first problem
session.
• PROBLEM SESSION: Every student should be registered in one of
the two problems session held on either Tuesdays (8.30pm - 10.20pm)
or ii) Thursdays (8.30pm - 10.20pm) in CB 1.112 - NO EXCEPTIONS.
Please note the course number for the problem sessions is Math 2051. The
problem sessions are essential for the course. In particular all
quizzes will be conducted only during the last half-hour of the
problem session.
• Recommended Use of the Problem Session: Due to the vast
amount of material that I have to cover, I will not be able to dwell too
much on illustrative numerical calculations. You should use the problem
sessions to work out such problems. I will periodically give HWs, which
will not be graded, and which will contain such routine drill problems. You
should try and solve them yourselves, with assistance from the TA if need
be and from me outside of regular class hours.
• Grading Policy:
 • Quizzes: 20 percent
• 3 Midterms: 20 percent each. Will be held Feb 23rd, March 23rd and
April 20th (all Thursdays) during class hours.
• Final: 20 percent. Will be held on April 27th (Thursday) from 5pm -
6.30pm. Kindly note the final starts at 5pm (NOT 5.30pm).

• Please Note Carefully:

1. Your schedule says that the maximum time allowed for an examination
is 2 hours and 45 minutes. However, this does not mean that the final
has to last that long. All examinations for this course will last at most
90 minutes.
2. Quizzes last 30 minutes.

• Quizzes There will be a total of 10 quizzes. If time permits (and there

is a sizeable demand), I will conduct a eleventh quiz as a makeup quiz. The
10 quizzes will be held on the following dates (during the last half-hour of
the problem session): • Dates for Quizzes:

• Tuesday Session: January 17th, 24th, 31st; Feb 7th, 14th, 28th; March
14th, 28th; April 4th, 11th.
• Thursday Session: January 19th, 26th; Feb 2nd, 9th, 16th; March 2nd,
16th, 30th; April 6th, 13th.
• There are no quizzes during a midterm week.

Math 2451 - Grading Scheme

• The grading is going to be cumulative as explained in class. In particular,
there will be no “grading on the curve”.

• ≥ 95% (A+); 87.5 - 95 (A); 82.5 - 87.5 (A-)

• 75- 82.5 (B+); 70-75 (B); 65- 70 (B-)
• 60-65 (C+); 55-60 (C); 50-55(C-)
 • 45-50 (D+); 40-45 (D); 35-40 (D-)
• < 35% - F; Hopefully, nobody will plumb this depth.

• Textbook is Vector Calculus by J. Marsden and A. Tromba. Students

are encouraged to actively use other books for broadening their horizons!! I
will periodically refer you to other texts on related material.
• Notes:

• I will quite frequently give you additional notes. These notes are meant
to complement the text, and hence must be read. In the event that the
notes contain material that you will not be tested on, you will be so
informed. Typically, the notes will relate the material of this course to
other courses that are of interest (such as Differential Equations, Lin-
ear Algebra, Physics/Engineering Courses). Occasionally the notes
will supersede the text, in the sense that they may be a
shortcut to what is leisurely covered in the text.
• Links for lecture notes: These notes will be available on the web at
the Mcdermott Library Reserves page. Specifically i) go to UTD’s home
page; ii) click on the library link; iii) go to the “Reserves” link (it appears
under “Services”); iv) Input my name (“Ramakrishna”) in the box for
“Instructor” by scrolling down adequately; v) This will lead you to the
link (called “E-items”) for the notes (currently there are 15 lecture notes
in pdf version).

• Deviation from Order in Textbook: Please be forewarned that

there will be deviations from the logical order presented in the textbook.
Therefore, if you miss classes, the onus is on you to check
with me regarding which sections or notes were covered. I
will not track you down to keep you up to date.

• More on Grades and the Like:

• Each quiz will be worth 12 points. The best 10 of the 11 will count
 towards your quiz grade (this is assuming a 11th makeup quiz is offered).
The total will then be divided by 6 to account for the 20 percent that
the quizzes constitute in the final grade for the course.
• It is to be understood that merely writing the answer down will get no
credit. The emphasis will be on displaying the method. At all times,
in your answer, the flow of logic and reasoning must be very clear. In
other words, the burden is on you to display on paper your thinking and
not on the grader to decipher what you may have meant. In particular,
this entails writing in complete sentences or using the permitted logical
connectives.
• Calculators: None will be allowed.
• Type of problems to be expected: Whilst there will be the odd
few drill problems (i.e., the ones involving routine insertion of numerical
values into some formula), the bulk of the questions will test your con-
ceptual understanding of the subject. In particular this means you may
be asked to show the validity of some statement in general.
• Cheating will not be tolerated. Students are expected to inform the
lecturer of any suspected violations of the honor code.
• Makeups: In general, there will be no make up exams or quizzes. To
makeup for a missed test or exam the following steps should be taken a)
Inform me in advance that you will be missing a test. My permission to
let you do this depends on the seriousness of the reason for your missing
the test - this has to be accompanied by serious documentation; and
ii) Make arrangements for taking a makeup test. The makeup has to
be usually within a week of the actual test that you missed. Failure to
complete either of these steps means a zero will be assigned to you for
that test.
 • CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF LECTURES (subject to
change)

Please pay attention to deviation in order from the textbook.

1. Inner products in Rn (Section 1.4); Orthogonal Projection (Sec 1.2, Pg

31 - 32 generalized to higher dimensions).
2. Graphs and level sets (notes expanding substantially on Sec 2.1)
3. Basic topology of Rn (Sec 2.2, supplemented by notes)
4. Linear and Affine Maps (Notes)
5. Differentiability (starting with the general setting), Tangent planes, Lin-
ear approximations (Sec 2.3, supplemented by notes
6. Chain Rule (notes)
7. Brief look at paths (Sec 2.4)
8. Gradients, Lie derivatives, Applications to solving ODEs, Scalar poten-
tials for gradient vector fields, Hamiltonian vector fields, the method of
suucessive integration (notes expanding substantially on Sec 2.6)
9. The Implicit function theorem(Sec 3.5)
10. Extrema of functions, Lagrange Multipliers (Sec 3.3 - 3.4)
11. Differential Forms 1: basic manipulation, wedge product, exterior deriva-
tive, div, grad, curl, dot and cross products as special cases, Poincare’s
lemma, vector field identities on Pg 306 derived via differential forms
(notes - see also Sec 8.6)
12. Differential Forms 2; Frobenius’s theorem, applications to the method
of first integrals (notes)
13. Differential Forms 3: Integration of differential forms, line and surface
integrals, all change of variable formulae (See Ch 6) as special cases
of one method, Stokes’ theorem, Greens theorem etc.,as special cases,
connection to the classical approach (notes - see Ch 7, 8)
14. Brief look at Fubini’s theorem and the error integral (Section 5.4, notes)
15. Complex numbers, quaternions, octonions, complex analysis derived
from vector calculus plus a little algebra (notes).

• Aims of the Course: The aim of the course is to emphasize those

aspects of the theory of functions of several real variables which are extremely
important in physics, engineering (electrical and mechanical), economics
and of course, mathematics itself. The emphasis will be on the qualitative,
quantitative and occassionally the philosophical aspects of those parts of the
course which are ubiquitious in these applications. As an example I will dwell
on the implict function theorem from several points of view. Likewise when
we get to vector fields I will relate it to differential equations - this connection
is very important and is one of the reasons vector fields play an important
role in applications. Other examples include the role of differentiability
in approximating a function via a linear function. The main goal is to
communicate the subtler, abstract aspects of the subject. This will dictate
the style of the course.
• Pace and Style of the Course: There are two overwhelming factors
which will decide the pace and style of the regular lecture hours:

1. There is a tremendous amount of material to be covered. It is not easy

to neglect any chapter of the text.
2. The major use of mathematics in general, and this course in particular,
is not to produce meaningless numbers out of arid formulae. Rather
the use is to observe patterns, extract the essence from these patterns,
deduce logical conclusions from this essence and then, most importantly,
interpret these conclusions.
Keeping in mind these two factors the style of the lectures will be as follows:

1. Most of the lecture will consist of motivating the material via i) the
naturality of the concept to be studied on basis of prior experience;
ii) plausibility arguments for the proposed formulae and properties; iii)
constructive proofs where this is possible; and iv) Relating various parts
of the syllabus to one another (thus, frequently my lectures will also
mention, in brief, material that will be covered in detail later).
2. Most concepts will be illustrated via a calculational example. But I
will not spend too much time on them. Calculations are important to
get a good feel for the subject. Every student should supplement the
calculations I do in class by going over the drill problems in the HW. No
student should feel bashful in soliciting my help (outside lecture hours),
the TA’s help and other sources. You are reminded that my office hours
are NOT the only times you can meet with me in person.
 • HOMEWORK LIST:
•: This is a partial HW list. These will not be graded. You should also
bear in mind that the purpose of these HWs is not one of preparation for
the midterms and final. Furthermore, since several topics will be covered in
a fashion different from that in the text, you should pay careful attention to
he prototype problems on these topics which I will solve during my lectures.
N.B: The page numbers below are for both the V and the IV edition (in
that order)
• Chapter 1:
Section 1.2: I will assign analogues of Qs 14, 15 on Pg 36/ 37 for higher
dimensional vectors.
Pg 86 - 87/ Pg 73 - 74: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9 (optional), 13, 15
Pg 88-93/ Pg 75 -79: 11, 27, 28, 29
Section 1.4 will be covered when we study integration. You should pay
attention to the prototype problems I solve.
• Chapter 2:
Section 2.1: 1, 2a, b, 4, 6, 17, 18. I will assign additional questions on
aspects of this section not in the text, when we cover this material in the
semester.
Section 2.2: 1, 9, 15, 20 (optional). Additional problems on determining
boundary points, open sets etc., will be assigned during the semester.
Section 2.3: 1, 2, 5, 7, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20
Section 2.4: (note this section will become more important when we discuss
line integrals, so we will go thru’ it in greater detail than there is in the text
at that juncture): 5 -9
Section 2.5: 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 27, 29 (many
more problems on the chain rule will be discussed during the semester).
Section 2.6: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18 (optional), 19, 22 (op-
tional) (this is where we will cover Lie derivatives etc., You should pay close
attention to the prototype problems I discuss on these topics).
Pg 173-180/ Pg 164-170: 6, 7, 8, 12, 14 (optional), 21, 23 (optional), 25,
29, 39, 41, 47-49 (optional), 54 (optional).
: Chapter 3:
Sec 3.1: 1, 5, 15, 17
Sec 3.2: 7 (optional)
Sec 3.3: 1, 4, 9, 41, 30 - both directly and via calculus (more problems on
positive and negative definiteness, global extrema will be assigned during
the semester).
Sec 3.4: 1- 5 (it is sufficient to just set up the Lagrange multiplier equations),
Exc 10 and 11 (do both with Lagrange multipliers and via methods of Sec
3.3 - once again it suffices to set up the Lagrange multiplier equations), 20
(optional), 23 (optional)
Sec 3.5: 2, 7, 8, 10 c), 12
Sec 3.6: Time permitting I will discuss some of the applications in both the
Section and the exercises.
Pg 255-260/ Pg 242 - 247: 13, 16, 19 (optional), 25, 30-35 (optional - this
circle of problems can be better solved via orthogonal projections).
• For the remainder of the course we will heavily use differential forms. So
you should pay attention to the prototype problems I solve. I will point
out some problems in the text which come close to my approach at the
appropriate juncture.
 MATH 2451 - REQUIRED SIGNED STATEMENT
Fall 2005
V. Ramakrishna

• Please read the following statement. Sign your name, print your full name where
indicated.

I have received the handout regarding grading policies, aims, pace and style of the
course, and the syllabus for the course. This handout was fully explained in the first
lecture. I have also read it and understood it.
SIGNATURE:
PRINTED FULL NAME:
MAJOR:
(PLEASE DO NOT WRITE YOUR SSN OR STUDENT ID NUMBER)