Happy Canada Day!

Office hours, tutorial, and class all start up again tomorrow, on the same schedule as in the first half of the course. There will however be no quiz tomorrow. I have posted next week's assignment here. It will be marked completed/not completed. (Problem 4 is completely optional.) We have covered enough material to do all of problem 1 and part of problem 3, and will cover the material needed to do problem 2 and the rest of problem 3 tomorrow.

I have noticed that there is something of a correlation between number of homework assignments completed and quiz mark. I suspect that this will hold up for marks on tests as well, so please do not ignore the homework assignments. They provide you an essentially risk-free way of getting (hopefully detailed) feedback on your level of understanding of the course material.

On that note, tomorrow we will talk about modified Bessel functions. Our textbook does not seem to have too much of a discussion of these functions; the referecnes I could find in a brief search were p. 187 and section 3.5.2, which would be good to review before tomorrow's lecture.

I have not entirely decided what we will talk about on Thursday yet: probably either some theoretical background for the separation of variables technique, or an introduction to Green's functions. I aim to cover the following topics in the remainder of the course: Green's functions (at least for Laplace's equation), the heat and wave equations, Fourier transforms, and asymptotic methods. We may or may not be able to get this far though.

I have started working on marking the test but it looks like it will be rather slow going. I will have it marked and ready for pick-up by Thursday of next week (which is the last class period prior to the drop deadline), or earlier if I ascertain that that is required by faculty policy (I am checking).

For those of you who missed the term test: if you have not already done so, please contact me as soon as possible to let me know why you missed the test so that I can be sure I have appropriate documentation. Please also let me know when this week or next week would work for you to do a make-up test. (Please note that the make-up test is not optional. The weight for the midterm will only be transferred to the final in the event that you are unable to make the makeup midterm for acceptable reasons, which must also be documented separately.)

If I do not receive appropriate documentation you will unfortunately receive a zero on the midterm.

I think there was something else but this announcement got too long a while ago so if I think of it I will put out another announcement to tell you about it! (And what it was, too!)

See you all tomorrow!

Nathan