To me, there always seemed to be a disconnect between the dry, tedious, math that standardized tests like the ACT, SAT, etc. emphasized and the math that I grew up loving. Especially puzzling was how educators bemoaned America's youth's lack of interest in math while at the same time, pushed for increasingly more standardized tests that took all the joy and discovery out of our classrooms.
So when my mom suggested that my sister spend her summer preparing for the PSAT, I offered to make my own set of math problems for my sister to do instead, in the hopes that I would be saving her from a summer of rote computation. In my problem sets, I strived to communicate a small portion of the fascination with which mathematics had enthralled me in ever since I was a kid. In particular, I used problems that I had run across in my various academic adventures that I found intriguing or useful in the real world.
This repo contains the product of that work. Both the pdf version and the latex source code are included. The problem sets are split into 3 parts, each part relatively balanced across the following sections:
- Intro to Linear Algebra/Calculus
- Applied Problems
- Pure math problems
- Mental Computation/Readings
These problems are aimed at high school students, ideally those who are taking, or have taken algebra and/or trigonometry.
I hope you enjoy and please feel free to add commits or point out errors.
To encourage truly deep thought, as well as group collaboration, solutions are not provided!
For those interested in discovering more math
- Quanta Magazine: A scientific online publication. Pretty in-depth articles with a slight emphasis toward pure mathematics.
- How to Solve It, Polya: A well-known short text on problem solving by Polya.
- EdX: A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider. Wide range of classes and subjects offered by an equally wide breadth of universities and institutions
- MIT OCW MIT puts all of their classes online! A great resource, as long as you can find the class you're looking for and it has the video lectures and other resources uploaded.
- Coursera: Another MOOC. Also great.