Gross Examination
October 6th, 2015The Billy Mays of Advanced Math?
Still fiddling with math and physics.
I’ve had the strangest sensation lately. I feel like I’m inside RLM, the math/physics/astronomy building at the University of Texas. This is the building where I worked and went to classes when I was hoping to get a doctorate. I guess I spent 20 hours a week there.
The people were really dreary. I’m not the most outgoing person on earth, but I could not make friends there. Could not do it. Everywhere I go, I manage to make friends with at least one person within a month. Not the physics department.
The guy who shared my desk in the TA office was okay, and there was a Navy guy who became an experimental physicist. He had a harder time with the work than I did, and I thought he was going to wash out, but he made it and I didn’t. There was also a guy I sort of talked to occasionally. He had a thing for Asian girls So much so that he planned to move to Japan to teach English.
Oh, my God. I just Googled him, and he’s a physics professor. In Tokyo. He has been busy.
I never made a dent socially while I was there, and I suffered pretty badly, but I miss certain things. I miss teaching. The kids I taught were not as odd as the grad students, and it was nice to know that I was good at something.
RLM is named for Robert Lee Moore, a famous mathematician from Texas. I Googled him the other day and found out. I’m sure I saw his name on a plaque whenever I entered the building, but I don’t recall.
Moore is famous for math, and also for racism. He refused to teach black students back when UT was forced to accept them. They still named a building after him. If you wear a Dukes of Hazzard T-shirt to your quantum mechanics class, you’ll probably be told to turn it inside-out, but you will still be expected to sit in a building named after a maladjusted, hateful, racist crank.
I looked around on Youtube for some complex analysis lectures, to help me remember what I used to know so well. I found Herbert Gross. If you’re a student, you have to check this guy out.
He appears in old black and white videos published by MIT Open Courseware. The video quality is about like old Andy Griffith shows, so I figured he was filmed in about 1960, but the videos are from the early 1970s.
He’s a magnificent teacher.
I don’t know for sure, but the impression I have from all my years of study is that teaching pedigree means a lot.
There are certain things people who study a given subject should know; things they will be expected to know, even though you don’t have to know them in order to be good at the subject. You can make up a series of lectures and teach a subject well without referring to other people’s lectures, but you are likely to miss various characteristic anecdotes and examples that are commonly taught.
I think this is because many instructors can trace their roots back to instructors who were seminal, just as piano teachers claim they can trace their roots back to Liszt. Wolfgang Pauli, or whoever, included this or that bit of information in his lectures, so his students went on to include it in theirs, and so on.
Studying under people whose lectures conform to common standards is helpful, because you will run into instructors who expect you to know things that are commonly taught, and they may put these things in assignments on on tests.
I guess that was a long digression, but the feel I get from watching Herbert Gross is that he developed right in the thick of the math/physics/engineering community in the northeast. He seems to know exactly what’s important and useful, as though he has heard it himself via a long practiced tradition.
He’s apparently still alive. Either that, or he died and no one remembered to remove his website. He was still around last year.
I don’t know if my guess about him is right, but I think it’s definitely smart to try to learn from people at places like MIT or Harvard or the University of Chicago when possible, before taking a chance on people whose pedigrees are unknown.
His videos are wonderful. He really flies, but he is exquisitely prepared, so everything he says is clear. If your instructors stink, check him out. I wish to God I had had Youtube back in my day, when I was watching my Japanese professor point at different expressions and say things like, “Jees one, jees one, all same.”
If you don’t understand what that means, we are in the same boat.
One nice surprise is that I don’t struggle. I guess that makes sense. After all, this material used to be easy for me, and it should be in my brain somewhere, waiting to be reactivated. I fast-forward a lot. But I do have to do problems, because understanding is not the same as remembering with the kind of familiarity required for actual work.
I don’t know why math was easy and physics was hard. Maybe it’s because math is easy, and physics is hard.
He refers to vector analysis (multivariable calculus) in his complex analysis lectures, so I am checking that out, too. Luckily, he has lectures on both topics.
I don’t know where this is going. If I can just get back to the point where I can look at a graduate physics text and have some understanding of what it says, it will be a huge relief. I feel much better about my brain. I am starting to feel smart again.
Life isn’t about self-confidence, but you shouldn’t doubt yourself wrongly, especially in your heart.
I hope the videos are useful to people. Forty years’ worth of MIT students can’t be wrong. Totally. Not about everything.
October 6th, 2015 at 10:20 PM
My physics took a narrower path. Designed an atomic bomb for my high school science class. It wasn’t too shabby for a 16-year-old kid, 4 to 6 kiloton yield. My science teachers failed me on the project (1/3 of my grade) because obviously a “kid” could not design something like that. Was then censured by the government when Lawrence Livermore Labs turned over my work to Los Alamos. My teachers ate a lot of crow–and I got an “A”–but missed out on the science fair because of them.
Accepted into the Nuclear Engineering at University of Tennessee as a freshman (something the university did not allow normally) and I eventually got to work the “Hot Cells” at Oak Ridge a couple of times. That was cool.
But, I got bored and dropped out–and never looked back. Church captured my interest and I was only going to college so that I could attend a fantastic church at the university. While theory has held my interest over the years, I have been bored stiff by too many of the teachers that are out there and was never motivated to delve into it again. I’ll check out the videos.
UT professors who were not native English speakers had to pass a language skills test in order to teach–I never got a bad one, but I was told there were a couple of Chinese mathematicians who were impossible to understand. Evidently they were passed because of their stature in their field.
October 11th, 2015 at 6:36 PM
I went to a private High School.
Last semester, got a physics instructor, who also taught the math class I was in. who was fresh from Bangladesh.
Anytime I asked for a clarification, I was treated like an idiot by him fro not understanding. 1972.
GPA took a hit and I didn’t think UM was going to do anything with me. Managed to get accepted after all and then dropped out when I found the work I missed in those classes left me unprepared.
I wonder how it might have turned out.
October 23rd, 2015 at 12:26 PM
In surfing Google today I came across your very kind words about my work and felt motivated to tell you more about the real me. Despite the fact that my archaically produced “Calculus Revisited” videos have become a cult classic, the five years I spent at MIT producing the course was an aberration in my 60 year teaching career. In terms of a sports analogy, I never aspired to be a great math “player” but my goal was to become a great math “coach”. While a great coach doesn’t have to play the game as well as a great player does, he has to understand the game even better than the great player. Namely the great coach has to become adept at tackling the issue of “different strokes for different folks”. Not all of his players have the same learning style or the same comfort level.
So even though my career goal was to become a high school math teacher, I decided to enter a Ph. D. program at MIT in order to help ensure that I really understood better the true essence of the mathematics I would be teaching. In other words I wanted to make sure that what I would be teaching my students was both correct and important for them to know in their later lives.
For reasons that are not important here I never did become a high school math teacher. Instead I became a pioneer in the community college movement where for 40 years I taught developmental math to mathematically at-risk adult learners; and in fact in 1974 became the founding president of the American Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges (AMATYC).
I had just completed ten years at Corning (NY) Community College where I came as the founding math department chairperson in 1958; when I was unexpectedly recruited to develop “Calculus Revisited” by MIT’s Center for Advanced Engineering Study”. It was a labor of love that took me five years to complete; after which (in 1973) I returned to my community college career by becoming the founding math department chairperson at Bunker Hill (MA) Community College where I remained until my retirement in 2003.
Since then I have been developing my own website (www.mathasasecondlanguage.comn) where I am uploading all of my work in arithmetic and algebra for anyone to use free of charge.
Last summer, at age 85, I made a series of 40 arithmetic video recordings that are meant to help elementary school teachers help their students to internalize arithmetic better. You might enjoy comparing how I look at age 86 when I am making videos with how I looked at age 42 when I made the calculus videos. If that is the case, the play list can be accessed by clicking on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TaLSX7xybA&list=PLufObkSlzUUU4oKivkiwchXBRfAzQXpcu
So in the words of the late Paul Harvey, “Now you know the rest of the story”.
Thanks again for your extremely kind words.
Herb Gross
PS
I can be reached directly at hgross3@comcast.net
October 23rd, 2015 at 1:54 PM
I apologize for having sent two similar messages I wrote the second message after I had been told that my first message couldn’t be sent becsuse of an error. However I see now that it was sent. I hope that the two messages did not contain contradictions of one another.
October 23rd, 2015 at 1:58 PM
Professor Gross:
Thanks for taking the time to write that. I never expected to hear from you. I guess I forget that everyone can see the Internet.
I put the complex analysis series on hold, because it showed me that I needed to go back and look at multivariable calculus. It looks like I’ll owe you tuition for two courses instead of one.
The videos you uploaded, along with similar offerings from other instructors, have shown me that we live in an age that offers new hope to people who want to educate themselves or revive knowledge and skills they have lost. There is nearly no limit to what a person with a broadband connection can learn, if he is willing to use it for things other than Facebook and looking at pictures of cats.
The organized approach you take has inspired me to be more methodical in all my studies. I am now working on my own notes for basic circuit analysis, and I’m forcing myself to explain every idea I encounter. It’s very helpful. It reminds me of what Richard Feynman said. I don’t recall the exact quote, but the basic idea was that if you can’t explain something to someone who lacks your training, you don’t really understand it.
You should be pleased with the lectures you created. The courses you cover are universal, and it isn’t likely that college math curricula will change much over the coming decades, so you may be a valuable resource to students who live a hundred years from now.
I could have used your lower-level videos when I went back to school for my physics degree. I signed up for a lot of hard courses and forgot that I had gotten terrible grades in math in high school. I had to do a lot of catching up in a big hurry. In fact, when I was teaching physics labs as a graduate student, there was at least one occasion when an undergrad knew something about algebra that I did not.
See you on Youtube.
October 23rd, 2015 at 2:19 PM
” I hope that the two messages did not contain contradictions of one another.”
Well, imagine how you would feel if you had written maybe 30,000 blog posts. Fortunately, no one pays attention.
October 27th, 2015 at 10:50 AM
Thanks Steve. Teaching has always been a labor of love for me and it always gives me great pleasure to receive comments such as yours. Looking it things from my perspective rather than that of the students’, I find it exciting that because of the Internet I have essentially been “cloned”. Namely thousands of students at different locations can be watching me at any time knowing that what they are seeing is exactly what everyone else is seeing.
It is sort of metaphysical known that the 42 year old Herb Gross in the calculus videos will always remain 42 years old and will most likely be stll teaching long after the 86 year old Herb Gross is no longer here.