Best online resource to help with Calculus III?

[coppercone2]

let us know in 10 years when it helped you professionally lol

[trilerian]

let us know in 10 years when it helped you professionally lol

Not sure if this is meant as sarcasm...

But regardless, I'm not sure it will ever help me professionally.  Going back to school is to help me better understand my hobby.  Professionally, I work in IT, I'm not sure I see that changing.  I may leverage the degree I get to help me in my current field, but the scope is purely for me. 

[IanB]

let us know in 10 years when it helped you professionally lol

I'm not sure why you would say that? I use far more advanced and complex mathematics in my professional life than I ever learned at university. It depends on the career path, obviously, but learning foundational mathematics is not something to be dismissive about. You need the foundation as a start to build upon.

[coppice]

My question: do any EEs here actually use Calc III to do their work?

I have no idea what it means. The US seems to have split a range of calculus related topics into nationally standardised chunks with associated numbers. If you haven't studied in the US the terms are meaningless. Perhaps there a list of topics, and an idea of how deeply they treat them, in each chunk available on the web somewhere.

[tggzzz]

I'll give that a try.  I have been quite impressed with ChatGPT so far, although it isn't always correct.  It has returned incorrect results for the determinants of matrices a few times

A word to the wise. Never, under any circumstances, trust any numerical or quantitative results from ChatGPT or similar LLM tools. They do not have any real understanding of what they are doing, and they cannot calculate things. They simulate understanding by giving very complex responses that make it seem like they understand what you are asking, but it is all a pretense. There is no actual brain behind the machine.

A major area of AI research is to make the leap from simulated cognitive ability to real cognitive ability.

Agreed.

LLMs produce sentences (and paragraphs) made up of words that are statistically likely to occur in a given context.

Humans who do that are called "bullshit artists". They fool other people who do not understand the subject.

[tggzzz]

Exam 2 is on Wednesday.  See if I do any better...  Bad news is my professor took the exam already and said it was extremely difficult.  She said she asked the exam coordinator to make it easier and they said no.  Great...

At university my second year maths exam's rubric was "full marks can be obtained for answers to about six questions".

[trilerian]

My question: do any EEs here actually use Calc III to do their work?

I have no idea what it means. The US seems to have split a range of calculus related topics into nationally standardised chunks with associated numbers. If you haven't studied in the US the terms are meaningless. Perhaps there a list of topics, and an idea of how deeply they treat them, in each chunk available on the web somewhere.

Having just finished my course, I can give you a decent idea of what was covered.  Started out with vectors, doing dot products and cross products, so we could learn about planes and normal vectors...  From there we got into partial derivatives and got introduced to gradients, and them we moved into double and triple integrals.  Once we had that under our belt we started dealing with vector calculus, which seems really relevant to an EE.  We used this theorem called the Fundamental Theorem of Line Integrals, basically it boils down to the difference between two points in a conservative vector field is the difference between f(b) - f(a).  Almost like measuring the potential difference between two points in an electric field.  Of course we didn't get into theory there, just the math, I kind of put two and two together...  We finished with Divergence Theorem, Stokes' Theorem, and Green's Theorem. 

Next semester is nothing to do with being an EE, and I am moving to 2 classes instead of 3.  I'll probably be able to do more online learning this way, but 3 in person classes along with a fulltime job and a side business was stretching me quite thin.  Especially since I was relearning calc I & II while taking calc III. I think the semester after that I will be taking Physics II and finally starting on EE courses with a Circuits class. 

I am happy I am going back to school though, I struggled with the decision for a while, but it has been a good experience.

[tggzzz]

I am happy I am going back to school though, I struggled with the decision for a while, but it has been a good experience.

I suspect the course will make little difference to your employability, not least because non-technical recruiters can't see past age, experience, personality - and not taking a chance that might backfire on them. Blasted HR droids belong in the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B .

But if you have enjoyed it, who cares. You've had fun and by learning something new you've demonstrated you are still alive!

[Analog Kid]

Has it been determined how the small binoculars will help

Not positive but I'd say the guy was referring to cheating on exams.
Pure unhelpful snark there.
Sure, pass the exam, but have no understanding of the subject matter. Great.
I guess that's what some kids today are doing.

[coppercone2]

you will never have a better appreciation of small optics after you see the calculus III that went into making the gradient in the refraction index of miniaturized binoculars

[MathWizard]

I love Calculus, I really need to make time for what ever all Calculus comes after vector C and basic DE's classes. I'm not getting any younger, the clock is ticking.

There's lots of full or nearly full course lectures on youtube. But actually these days with all the ads, it's drives me crazy. But there's definitely some good prof's and high quality recordings, and tons of good short video's too on any given topic.

I want to start going through some of the video's where people solve 100's of integral equations. I know most of the common ones, but I wonder how many more and what all other techniques there are past under-grad level ??

[coppice]

...  Started out with vectors, doing dot products and cross products, so we could learn about planes and normal vectors...  From there we got into partial derivatives and got introduced to gradients, and them we moved into double and triple integrals.  Once we had that under our belt we started dealing with vector calculus, which seems really relevant to an EE.

Interesting thoughts. Far more EEs are working with dot and cross products day after day than work with vector calculus.