Hi everyone!

To enable you to study for MIDTERM 1 on Thursday October 12 (in class period, 
week 7) there is no homework this week. Thus: homework 6 DOES NOT EXIST :-)
The next one will be homework 7, to keep assignment numbers in sync with the
week in which they appear. Discussion sections and office hours are as normal. 

Midterm 1 will cover only COUPLED LINEAR OSCILLATORS & INNER PRODUCT SPACES, 
i.e. everything up to but NOT including 2-body central force systems.  
The formula sheets that will be provided are in the top-level folder: 
Formulae-1Dmath, -3Dmath, and -Midterm1.

If you would like to try a PRACTICE EXAM, you can find two old midterms
in this folder. Do read the instructions on page 1 of the old midterms 
as they will be the same this semester.  Solutions are in the secure folder; 
for maximum benefit, be sure to work the problems BEFORE looking at them.
The solutions are in the form of bullet points that correspond to the elements
we looked for when grading the exam, i.e. the bullets are the solution steps 
for which you could obtain points. If there is a star, arrow, or some other 
prefix instead of a circular bullet, it indicates a remark / suggestion / 
hint / etc rather than something worth points.

Cheers, Naomi

P.S. Please beware of relying too much on practice exams: 
they inevitably contain only a *small sample* of what we covered (!)
so don't forget to REVIEW everything!  Good studying involves two activities: 
in no particular order, they are (a) PRACTICE and (b) STRUCTURE.
For (a), go back through the problems from homework, discussion, lecture, 
and textbook examples. If you seek more, Morin's textbook (online at the 
library, see the INFO-General.txt file) is a huge source of worked problems.
For (b), imagine that everything we've learned is a messy pile of tools 
thrown into a bag. To make those tools useful, you need to IDENTIFY them all,
then ORGANIZE them. You need to label your tools, then sort them into an 
orderly mental TOOLBOX with labelled drawers and sub-compartments. 
The formula sheet is a bare-minimum version of such a toolbox; 
the topic list in the INFO-Syllabus file is another version.  
If you want to hear more about this crucial process of structuring 
material and didn't get the accompanying speech from my 325 class, please 
ask me on Tuesday and I will happily produce said speech. :-) 

P.P.S. I am often asked "HOW MANY QUESTIONS WILL BE ON THE EXAM"? Answer:
irrelevant, only time matters. There will be as many questions as I can
solve at full speed in 80 min / k, where k is a real number between pi and 4.