UREM-ULB :
Unité de Recherche sur l’Enseignement des Mathématiques

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18.098 / 6.099 Street-Fighting Mathematics

Ce cours apprend l’art de deviner des résultats et de résoudre des problèmes sans rédiger une démonstration ou faire un calcul exact. Les techniques abordées sont le raisonnement sur les cas extrèmes, l’analyse dimensionnelle, la discrétisation, la généralisation et l’analyse d’images. Les applications incluent du calcul mental, de la géométrie dans l’espace, des intervalles musicaux, des logarithmes, de l’intégration, des séries infinies et des équations différentielles.

Course Highlights

This course features in readings an electronic textbook developed specifically for the course. The chapters are accessible to anyone with a knowledge of algebra, trigonometry, and some single variable calculus. Dr. Mahajan writes with a clear, conversational style.

Course Description

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.) This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

Recommended Citation

For any use or distribution of these materials, please cite as follows :

Sanjoy Mahajan, course materials for 18.098 / 6.099 Street-Fighting Mathematics, IAP 2008. MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.