Course Summary

As the name suggests, Math 116Z (Applied Calculus II) is a second course in calculus which aims highlight applications of the subject from the real world. The course begins where a typical introduction to calculus finishes: at the definition of the integral and its connections to so-called anti-derivatives. After refamiliarizing ourselves with these basic terms, we'll spend the first half of the course covering integrals in depth: first by developing techniques for evaluating difficult integrals, and then by discussing a variety of applications of the integral.

In the second half of the course we change gears, aiming to generalize the notion of tangent line that is introduced in differential calculus. We will quickly see that we can create tangent polynomials of arbitrarily large degree, and that higher-degree polynomials typically give a better fit to the original curve. The question arises whether these polynomials will "eventually" agree with the function; answering this question requires us to grapple with the question of infinite sums and how we can use them to build functions. This will result in a concept known as Taylor series. At the end of the course, we might briefly mention how these same ideas can be used to express functions as sums of sines and cosines, yielding so-called Fourier series. We might also cover some selected topics related to differential equations.

Course Instructor

The professor for this class is Andy Schultz. His office is on the fourth floor of the Science Center, room 408. Office hours will be held

For now, we'll plan to convene in or around my office (rom 408 of the science center). In the event that we've got a lot of folks coming to a given office hour, we might go looking for a nearby classroom to house us all. If you'd like to attend office hours via Zoom, please email me ahead of time so I can make sure to be logged into Zoom.

You are highly encouraged to attend office hours, and you never need an appointment to do so. If scheduled office hours don't fit with your schedule, please contact the instructor so that he can either adjust when ``official" office hours are held or set up an appointment to help you outside of office hours. Please come to the professor's office or send him an email if you ever want to discuss material from the class or ask about homework problems!

You can contact the instructor at . Though he is always happy to receive emails from you with questions or concerns about the course, he can't guarantee that he'll be able to promptly reply to emails late at night or over the weekend. If you do contact the professor by email, please be sure to follow standard email etiquette. In particular, please make sure you include a greeting and signature and avoid abbreviations. If you're contacting him to ask about a problem, please be sure to specify what the problem asks (as opposed to asking something like ``I can't get problem 2 and need your help").