CS221: Logic & Discrete Mathematics (Udacity)

Although it's been indefinitely delayed for just about a week now, I'm anxiously looking forward to Udacity's second math-focused class. Taught by Dr. Jonathan David Farley, the intro (see the video below) covers the basics of what he'll be covering. Since I have a for-credit Discrete Mathematics on my academic schedule in Spring 2013, this should be a good chance to get ahead on the topic.

Once the course goes live, I'll be sure to update my experiences here. Until then, I'll be waiting for week 2 of ST101 and continue on with my summer coursework.

ST101: Intro to Statistics (Udacity)

This is a short summary of Udacity's new offering: ST 101 - Introduction to Statistics.


Udacity's latest offering is something that interested me as soon as I saw the announcement. Since I'll be taking Mathematical Statistics I in the fall (for credit), the ability to freely review what I know about Statistics and learn some new concepts intrigued me. With Udacity's course offerings being 6-8 weeks, and ST101 starting this week (June 25), it fit very well into my schedule so as not to overload me when the fall semester begins.

I'm had time to review about half of the first week's offerings, which mostly focus on "What is Statistics?" and how to chart and analyze data. Sebastian Thrun begins with a fictional list of houses sold based on square footage and the sale price. From this he proceeds into a concise explanation of the basic, from linearity to scatterplots to various graphing styles. All of it is laced with Thrun's typical humor and obvious love of teaching. Having taken the Artificial Intelligence course last year with Thrun, I can clearly see some of the places where his online teaching style has evolved over the past few months. He's getting better at the intricacies of a field he is pioneering, and it shows.

I've posted a copy of the quasi-syllabus for the class below. If you're interested in following along, the class has just started, so there's still time to begin with playing catch up.

From Udacity: 

• Unit 1: Visualizing relationships in data

  Seeing relationships in data and predicting based on them; dealing with noise 

• Unit 2: Processes that generates data

  Random processes; counting, computing with sample spaces; conditional probability; Bayes Rule 

• Unit 3: Processes with a large number of events

  Normal distributions; the central limit theorem; adding random variables 

• Unit 4: Real data and distributions

  Sampling distributions; confidence intervals; hypothesis tests; outliers 

• Unit 5: Systematically understanding relationships

  Least squares;residuals; inference 

• Unit 6: Understanding more complex relationships

  Transformation; smoothing; regression for two or more variables, categorical variables 

• Unit 7: Where to go next

  Statistics vs machine learning; what to study next; where statistics is used
  Final exam

Coursera Math-related Courses Starting in June 2012

Just a quick update today regarding the Math-related free courses that are starting up at Coursera this month. I'm enrolled in the Algorithms course, although I'm not sure I'll have the time necessary to truly tackle the content. I may just watch the videos for some general knowledge and skip the application exercises.

Listed below is an abridged list based on Cousera's announcement, trimmed to just include the two Math-related courses (both are computer science courses with a heavy application of mathematics).

Classes beginning this month...

Starting on June 11th (today!):

	Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part I  Prof. Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University, 6 weeks https://www.coursera.org/course/algo
	Cryptography  Prof. Dan Boneh, Stanford University, 6 weeks https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto

On Citations and APA Style

It's amazing how a little thing like the formatting and style of citations can become a big deal. Some students dread citations, although I've always found them to be more annoying than actually difficult. There are, after all, style guides that lay out pretty much a single way of doing them for any specific situation. Sometimes they get a little confusing, but Google is your friend in most cases.

I face a situation that I'm sure most everyone faces at some point in their academic life: I've always been told to use MLA formatting for as far back as I can remember, and now one of my courses requires the use of APA formatting for citations. Not the biggest deal, but something that I'm going to need to review and double check myself on when writing the single paper that requires its use.

After some quick searching, I've found some useful resources and places to find specifics about citing certain sources (including my Kindle formatted textbook for the class).

• apastyle.org - This seems to be the official site of the official style guide. Lots of useful articles and Q&A-style posts that show up in search results.
• Purdue OWL - This was a site that I used for MLA guidance, and it seems to have a great free collection of APA how-tos as well. I highly recommend it.
• Cornell - Cornell has a nice, simple example page for various citation styles.

If I've missed an obvious resource, please let me know in the comments!

The First Day of a Short Summer

The summer semester of university classes is always an interesting experience as a student. I've only made use of this "extra semester" two or three times in my life. Previously, it was in the first couple of years of my twenties, when free time was plentiful and taking a class or two over the summer seemed like a good way to avoid having to find a job (boy, was I looking at the world the wrong way). Now, taking classes over the summer is an opportunity to not only take on more opportunities to learn, but also to (gasp!) move even more quickly towards a new career. Times sure have changed.

Today is the first day of my current load of summer classes, and there are two of them this time. Both are online, and fall under what UIS calls their Engaged Citizenship Common Experience requirement. I'll get into more details about the classes themselves in future posts.

What makes summer classes interesting? First and foremost, summer classes are compact. They tackle three to four credit hours in eight weeks instead of the usual 16 weeks that a fall or spring course would be allotted. For many people I know, this seems like academic suicide, but I enjoy the condensed and high-speed environment. I find that in longer courses that lack consistently interesting material, my interest tends to wane around week ten and I have to double my efforts to remain engaged with the class. For online classes, this is an even bigger issue, as the motivation to log-on and participate is more self-induced than when having to sit down in class and focus on the professor at a set time. If a course never gets to that tenth week, I find my engagement level to be much higher on average.

Secondly, every university I've seen limits summer course loads to ten credits or less. UIS limits a student to eight credit hours during the summer, and I think it's a wise decision. I'm currently taking seven credits, and I believe that it alows me to focus better. Compared to the regular semesters where I find myself taking 16 or 17 credits (on top of my full-time work schedule), the summer course limits allow students to knock out half a semester of credits in half the time without worrying about overloading themselves with four or five classes.

With the next eight weeks of classwork looking me square in the eye, it looks like it will be an exciting two months. I hope to keep up with regular posts here on various topics. Time to get started.

An Introduction

Welcome to Math Majeure!

You're probably wondering what the heck this place is. That's quite simple, really. It's a blog. You probably already figured that out. More specifically, it's a blog about majoring in mathematics. Drilling down even deeper, it's a blog about my personal experiences with being a math major while also maintaining a full-time job. As of the time I'm writing this, my experience in a work in progress.

I began my journey in 2011, at the age of 28. I'd been (and currently still am) working in I.T. support for about six years. While it's not a bad career, it's just not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Fixing computers was always a hobby of mine as a child, but I decided one day that I wanted to go back to school and get at least a four-year degree. I started in Computer Science at the local two-year community college, but shortly into my first semester back I changed my mind.

I was sitting in the second or third meeting of my Calculus I class, which I'd decided to take in order to refresh my knowledge on the subject (my last Calculus class had been around 2001-2002). I was enjoying the discussions immensely, and it was as if a spark had reignited a passion in my mind.

Looking at the class schedule for previous semesters, I noticed that most of the required Computer Science classes took place during the day. I worked full-time during the day, so these classes were out of the question (as was quitting my job, if at all possible). I could take all of the math courses I'd need at night, but not the computer science courses. This led me to one obvious possibility: major in math!

That solved my dilemma of how to get my first two years of degree work in, but presented another problem: how was I going to finish my third and fourth years while still working full-time. Most "go to school at night" programs in the area were focused on majors that led to obvious fields of employment: nursing, accounting, technical skills (the same type of fields that got me my current job in computer maintenance), and the like. I didn't want to settle for one of those, even though they are perfectly respectable fields. I wanted to do more math!

I googled, and I googled some more. I tried all types of phrases, from "math bachelors degree full time job" to "mathematics online degree." This eventually led me to the University of Illinois at Springfield's math department (UIS). They offered a fully-accredited, fully-online math degree. "Eureka!" was the first thing that came to mind, but it seemed too good to be true. This was a state university, not a fly-by-night college located in some foreign country I'd never heard of. It was also a true math degree, not one that was focused on applying to a specific field of employment or just teaching. I never had to set foot on their campus, and could keep my job the entire time I was working on my bachelor's degree. There had to be a catch, but I couldn't find one.

I continued searching for other options, but I couldn't find any that fit what I was looking for. So, UIS it was. I decided to finish up my first two semesters at community college (I would need a total of four, two of which are still coming up as I write this post), and then applied to UIS as a transfer student for dual-enrollment. I applied in the summer of 2012, and was accepted under the conditions that I finish my two-year degree on time. The plan was coming together!

My ultimate goal is to get a PhD in Mathematics. Today I don't know how I'm going to do that, but I'm not that worried. One step at a time, as they say. I'm focused on getting my four-year degree, and then I'll go from there. I'm putting the horse in front of the cart, rather than the other way around.

So, here we are today (June 2012). I've got two online summer courses lined up that start tomorrow, and four more courses scheduled for the fall semester (two in-person at the community college, and two online at UIS). I've started this blog to share my experiences and keep myself accountable by social interaction. Hopefully I'll enjoy writing it, and you'll enjoy reading it.