116 karma · joined March 29, 2014
"Fundamental university physics Volume 1: Mechanics" by Alonso and Finn. This book seems to be not very well known in the USA, but it is very popular in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. It is your classical introductory physics/mechanics course with a very high emphasis on calculus.
"Computational partial differential equations" by Hans Peter Langtagen. A book on numerical methods for solutions of PDEs. It has the right amount of rigour (so you are able to tackle the literature), but it also includes code and plenty of practical advice.
"Nonlinear dynamics and chaos" by Strogatz. I think this book is really well known and I can't add much.
In the end, it seems the entire article can be summarised to, "it is all good to google for some recipes to solve your problems, but you also should care about some deeper understanding". Is there anything else to it?
Now, orbital mechanics do display unstable behaviour. I don't dare to adventure on how people work around this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-posed_problem
I would say a course on trigonometry usually covers (my experience): trigonometric functions exact value of them for the angles 30, 45, 60, 90 ... degrees Trigonometric formulas for the sum and difference of angles. A formuka for the double and the half angle. Law of sine and law of cosine Lots of relations derived from the Pythagoras theorem (sin^2+cos^=1) how to solve trigonometric equations
With all this, you are equipped to completely determine a triangle, knowing some of its and the length of some its sides. As as application, I was taught, how to measure heights and distances provided you can measure angles.
Thus, without trigonometry, it would be fairly hard to take a course on analytic geometry.
Now, how would the course be enhanced by introducing sine as the solution of an ODE?
And the reality is, that the definition of sine as a ratio of the catheti and hypotenuse is a rigorous definition of the function. Strictly, this sine is different from the sine of calculus. The first, the sine from Euclidean geometry, assigns a real to pair of rays, while the calculus sine, is function from the real numbers to the reals. And it does take some work to link them formally.
When we were introduced the sine and the cosine function, we were already familiar with Thales theorem, so therefore we could show that this ratio was a constant.
I am quite sure historically as well sine and cosine predate the more formal construction of those functions, be it as a series, solution of an ODE or inverse of arc sin (and this defined as an integral)...
Moving to US seems a bit harder, but I wouldn't mind if I achieve this in the long term.
I don't want to be picky. But I would not attribute your ability to read Portuguese to your musical background, but to your Spanish. My experience is that most Spanish speakers can read Portuguese to a certain degree and vice-versa. Never having studied French, I was able to read some child comics.
Me and my friend implemented a very simple algorithm. All the sensors measured distances to objects, and to every reading we would assign a vector whose direction oppose the one of the sensor and length, inversely "proportional" to the distance. Add all the vectors and move in this direction with a speed proportional to the length.
This turned out to work very well to avoid static obstacles and other robots. Most students implemented finite state machines. They crashed quite a lot and their movement was very clumsy, which I suppose was due to the fact that the transition of states was not very smooth.
To be fair, our success was a combination of luck and laziness too. If we had more time, we would have implemented a FSM too.