Day 12
I’ve been working with Organic Chemistry as a Second Language by David Klein for a few days now. I find the book the most helpful as a check for whether I understand the basics. It also provides an outline of the important considerations for various types of problems. For example, when considering resonance I need to keep in mind the octet rule, electron density, not breaking single bonds. The introduction to the book states that it should be used in conjunction with your textbook and lecture notes. I believe this to be a good recommendation. The Klein book has a good set of training problems. My textbook has more challenging problems that will expand my understanding. If I hit a snag, I can flip back to the Klein book to get a quick rundown of the steps. It’s so easy to start combining steps or skipping steps when working problems, so I find it very helpful to have a quick checklist to see whether I made an easily fixable mistake.
I watched the fifth differential equations lecture today. While the lecture focused on Bernoulli equations and equations with linear coefficient, there was also a good rundown of all the types of equations that had been covered up to that point. Here were the types discussed and some of my quick notes from that lecture: differential equations could be exact (are second partials equal?), separable (can you separate y’s and x’s?), homogeneous (y = vx to transform into separable), linear (multiply by integrating factor), Bernoulli (does it have the form of the Bernoulli equation?; convert to linear), and equations with linear coefficients. I will flesh out this jotted notes and make index cards with notes and a good example for each type of differential equation covered. This is likely the final lecture I will watch before school starts. I will now work on problems of the type covered up to and including lecture 5.
Also, I’ve visited Paul’s Online Math Notes many times. Here’s a link to the section on differential equations.
Numbers for the day:
Before 6 p.m.
Organic Chemistry – 90 minutes; review of resonance structures.After 6 p.m.
Differential Equations – 90 minutes; watched lecture 5 and some review.
Physics – 30 minutes; review.
Workout – 30 minutes; walk.
