Self Introduction - Wesley Roberts

[Wes]

Hi All,

Following my successful application I am looking forward to a new kind
of learning experience here at p2pu. As mentioned in my application I
do have a first year math course under my belt but that was a long
long time ago (I have lost most of it so expect basic questions at
first). I currently work in Remote Sensing Research so I come across
math all the time, unfortunately, it passes by with much anxiety. I
don't have a specific field or subject that I am interested in but I
guess matrices are important as well as anything to do with optics or
that will allow me to understand the math associated with light
interactions in the atmosphere as well as the surface of the Earth. We
call it radiative transfer modelling (modelling light interactions as
it passes through the atmosphere). Geometry and trig are also quite
common, perhaps it would be useful for me to find some examples of
applications and post questions about them. Your thoughts on this
would be beneficial. I have been to the syllabus page but have not
seen anything specific about the different topics. Will we be setting
our own syllabus?

Hope everyone is well and enjoy your weekend,
Wesley

[Jubal E.]

Hi Wesley,

I think the goal is for everyone to sort of figure out what they are
looking for in the course, ie what kind of math they are looking to
learn, and either work with someone else who wants to learn the same
thing and/or share our knowledge on the subjects that other people are
interested in. The other big thing seems to be finding and sharing
resources. Having examples would def, be a great place to start, most
people seem to either not know what they are interested in yet, or
have a really broad area of math that they are looking at, so I bet if
you posted some problems we could get some discussion going, at least
about how and where to look for answers to them, and start to figure
out how we all are going to work together on this.

Jubal E.

ps- it seems like DIY may be the wrong acronym maybe DIO, do it
ourselves : ) would be better.

[Jonathan Roberts]

Hi Jubal,

Yes, in brief I think that this course is more about the interactions than "solve for x" so to speak. I am leaning towards the PreCalc option as my math skills are rudimentary at best. For me it is a case of building up my confidence wrt math and its application to my everyday work. I am not interested in becoming a math genius I just want to have sufficient knowledge to apply well known analysis procedures to my data and then understand how the output helps me answer a particular research question (I know I can do math it is just a case of confidence). I am torn between PreCalc and or just asking questions about wavelets and their applications to Remote Sensing, for example. I don't want to jump the gun so will stick with PreCalc for now. You need the basics so am thinking that it would be beneficial to start here

http://qpr.ca/math/resources/menus/precalculus/index.htm

I have found several resources on the net wrt math. For those who are keen on you tube videos check out 

http://chycho.blogspot.com/

I was planning on using his videos to get an introduction, have not explored them at length but they may be useful to others on this list. Here are some of the other resources I have found, but, have never really looked at them in any detail.

http://www.sosmath.com/index.html

http://www.mathopenref.com/index.html

http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

http://planetmath.org/

http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/

Hope you are all well.

Wesley

--
"The shin bone is a device for finding furniture in a dark room."
Anon