Is American education being bad a meme? Do people in other countries really learn analysis in first year university instesd of just calculus? While I can believe that they learn calculus to a much higher level in high school I refuse to believe all third worlders know rigorous maths.
Is American education being bad a meme...
Brayden Allen
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Josiah Roberts
Already a thread on muh American university education.
William Foster
dude we just have minorities who drag our scores down. White americans score around the same as finland(who are fifth) on PISA test.
Jordan Morgan
Yes, they do learn analysis but it's more of a calculus/analysis hybrid by American standards than the typical upper-division real analysis we take here
Nolan Hill
Can you elaborate? I wonder what would be missing from my analysis class. (It was called "analysis", not "real analysis", for my program (not being a math program) didn't have a complex analysis course in it.)
Ryder Campbell
I'm a European who came to the US for his Master's. I know other people who did the same or came here one year as high school exchange students.
>guy who came here as high school exchange student says he felt like every course was one or two years behind
>he says he had to work a lot to get back to pace when he went back to Europe
>as a Master's student, I've taken graduate courses that, to my disappointment, didn't go any deeper than some of my undergrad courses
>introductory reminders about what is a decibel, a Fourier transform, etc.
>you can clearly tell some native students coming from their undergrads are clearly struggling
>easy as fuck exams and inflated grades because they don't want to upset their students (clients)
Not everything is bad, though. Teacher quality floor is way higher, probably because they're being recorded and they can actually get fired. Also, from what I've seen watching recorded lectures from elite schools, those offer a better education.
What I would do if I were an American:
>study abroad in Europe for undergrad studies: it's gonna be cheaper, you're going to get a better education, and you get a cool experience from living overseas
>go back to the US for Master's/PhD (assuming you want to work in the US)
What I would fo if I were a European:
>study in Europe and only do Master's/PhD in the US if you want to work in the US or you get accepted at MIT
Jace Bennett
in myuni they call it analysis insteaad of calculus, but i have o clue of the differences... What is real analusis?
Liam Brooks
Why do you keep posting this ugly bitch
Noah Ortiz
Calculus is about calculating derivatives and integrals, and techniques for doing so. Analysis is about studying the notions of derivatives, integrals, and related concepts like limits, from first principles in an axiomatic way, building up those concepts from set-theoretic assumptions and studying their properties.
Learning how to calculate tricky integrals using the method of substitution is calculus. Proving that an everywhere-continuous function that has values 0 and 2 in its range must necessarily also have 1 in its range is analysis.
Lucas Kelly
It depends more on the university itself desu.
In mine's we took analysis until the 4th semester, but in other states basic analysis stuff is part of calculus 3 or 4.
Noah Gray
Check out Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis, that's what my uni uses
Lucas Cooper
That's... not helpful. If I was aware of anything in these common textbooks that was missing from my own curriculum, I wouldn't be asking this question.
Is there any specific material you know of that is usually present in American analysis courses and usually absent in European ones?
Aiden Reed
No. I didn't know you guys used Rudin. If you guys do throw Rudin at freshmen then American math education is ridiculously bad compared to Europe
Jeremiah Torres
Not so sure saving these things till later is a bad thing. Its ok to spend time getting comfortable with introductory topics so you have a solid intuition moving forward. There's no reason an freshman needs to be well versed in measure theory or axiomatizations of integration. That early its just a waste of time for most people that could better be spent elsewhere.
Cooper Gomez
>No. I didn't know you guys used Rudin.
Whoops, it seems I had a different book in mind than the one you described. I must have gotten my titles crossed.
No, I did not use this book or a direct equivalent in my first-year analysis class. None of this material looks too unexpected, but this is substantially more than we did in one first-year course. My class covered about half of this material; only the part as it applies to the real numbers specifically, and without some of the later-chapter topics (Lebesgue theory, Stokes' theorem, completeness). A version that uses a more abstract topological viewpoint was offered in a later course, after some more experience with abstract mathematics. (That later course was an elective for me, as it was not a math program. I imagine it's a core class for math students.)
Owen Wilson
South american here. We take real analysis instead of calculus. What's the point of learning to derivate/integrate without understanding it?
Adrian Evans
Forgot to say: Engineer student
Henry Clark
So in other words it is abstract shit that non-mathematicians will never need? So I don't know why people here are so smug about muh mathematical rigor and look down on engineers, CS students, and scientists for not having that level of rigor. Does a carpenter need to know how to construct a nail gun?
Gabriel Reyes
if you want to do research and create new things in these fields, then yes, you have to know them so you dont embarrass yourself
Aaron Hill
was the high school taking the AP classes or the normal ones? we dont have a set curriculum really, people can go at their own pace for most subjects
Tyler Ortiz
I plan to go to a German uni for my masters if none of the US schools give me any money or if i dont get accepted right into a PhD program. Cost difference including tuition, fees, and cost of living would be $80k-110k cheaper for the two years of a masters, then I will probably just try to do a PhD back in the US or maybe get a job if there is a comfy one.
Juan Sullivan
Analysis is the name for calculus in other countries.
Don't listen to memes.
So basically when you hear a euro bragging about taking analysis know that they're bragging about freshman calculus.
They're retarded basically.
Think of it this way, if American higher education is so bad then why is it that most worthwhile research comes from the US? The US dominates academia for a reason.
Michael Adams
>So in other words it is abstract shit that non-mathematicians will never need?
Pretty much, yeah. This depth of understanding is occasionally useful outside mathematics proper, but those cases are few and far between.
>So I don't know why people here are so smug about muh mathematical rigor and look down on engineers, CS students, and scientists for not having that level of rigor.
Because it's a fine way of feeling smugly superior to someone else, which as we all know is what Jow Forums is really about.
Bentley Sanchez
>The US dominates academia for a reason.
Import Asians and europeans.
Ryder Bennett
In my country (Italy) we have single variable real analysis, which is rigorous and is based on some notions of topology, then analysis 2 which is multiple variabile analysis, then 3 which is complex analysis and 4 measure theory
Nolan Richardson
Worst education ever
Daniel Gutierrez
every country does that though, we just get the better ones probably because of money
Tyler Morris
Яussian here from a maths department. We were taught Lesbesgue integration, exterior algebra, manifolds, etc. on the first year. No idea about engineers but I know physicists from parallel groups had Zorich as the analysis text which is pretty advanced compared to, say, Stewart's calculus.
Michael Diaz
canadian from a university here. we were taught theory
Joshua Foster
I study physics in Norway, and here we take a fairly rigorous Calculus/analysis course in our first semester, followed by multivariable calc, linear algebra and vector calculus in our second.
Granted, they front-load all our maths courses, so that they're done in the first 3 semesters. Only took one course in Physics during my first year.
Julian Scott
Does everyone know set theory and basic proofs before coming in? If not, how do you get through that AND the actual content in a semester?
Anthony Rivera
>Is American education being bad a meme?
Not in the slightest. It is terrible. Everything below high school is to crush imagination, creativity, and instill high order consumerism, sheepism, and prevent uprising of any kind. High school is strictly to grind test scores so schools can get more funding for sports. College is absolutely nothing more than a tuition farm for grant and loan money.
Jason James
Because the schools minorities go to are underfunded and fucked up. I would know, I went to minority schools my whole life. At my school, we were walking around going on as normal while there were guys in hazmat suits right along with us trying to take care of the lead and asbestos everywhere. The high school down the street had no air conditioning and rats were running around freely. It's hard to make good grades where you're in an environment where cancer is literally in the air and you're sweating your ass off because it's 100 degrees in the building.
Ayden Green
theguardian.com
Not as bad as I thought, actually.