As one might expect from a calculus course, it wasn't particularly easy or fun. That said, I don't think it was ever unreasonably difficult. The weekly homework was quite manageable with regular lecture attendance, and the quizzes associated with the homework were just questions taken from the homework, and so were also pretty easy. Both midterms and the final were very fair as long as you had some idea what was going on. Really, the course is totally fine as long as you're on top of things. I do wish we were warned in MATH 101 that series would make a brutal comeback though.

The first three weeks were a continuation of the vector calculus covered at the very end of MATH 200. I found that part to be somewhat brutal. The rest of the course was something of an introduction to differential equations, which I found, for the most part, to be significantly easier. These two parts of the course have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It was very interesting to learn more of the math behind a lot of the first year physics equations, and also to learn a bit about other applications of differential equations.

Tom was hands down my favourite math prof ever. His Brightspace had a lot of stuff, but it was pretty well-organized and very helpful. His care for our success was very evident in all the effort he put into creating extra practice problems and detailed pages about all the exams. His lectures were amazing and he would tell us what we should expect on an exam while he was covering the content. He answered questions with tons of detail during lectures, and was quite active in the course forums and so was very easy to reach pretty much whenever. He was also very communicative about homework/marking updates, or if he was going to be unavailable at certain times. If I ever had to take another math course and doing it with Tom was an option I wouldn't hesitate to sign up.

Review integration and series from MATH 101. The less time you have to spend figuring out how series work while learning new content, the better off you'll be.

Its not an insanely hard course but its definitely work intensive. The other comment about this course said it was pretty much easy, i could see ways in which its easy but i wouldnt say its a easy pass lol you must practice alot and unless you are a math genius itll take effort. Overall i would say it combines the harder aspects of calculus 2 and 3 (thankfully not alot of trigonometric substitution) and is overall harder than both calc 2 and 3. might be different for others tho - if you enjoyed and did well in power series for calc 2 partial fraction decomposition, integration by parts ; double / triple integrals then maybe this course will be very easy for you. For me it was more difficult than calculus 2 and calculus 3 but not by alot.

It continues from where uvic calculus 3 stops, with basic line integrals -> work/circulation/flux calculations using single parametrized integral and then using double integrals with greens theorem; surface integrals and then finally covering stokes/divergence theorems. thats about it for calculus portion. (this takes about 1.25 months to complete) The ODE portion covers first and higher order homogenous / nonhomogenous solving methods (integration factor, substitution methods, variation of parameters, undetermined coefficients, characteristic solution of higher order ode; powerseries expansion and finally fourier series.

Prof was very lovely lady, took questions often in lecture and tried her best to explain what was going on, but personally sometimes she (and other uvic calculus professors) went just a little too fast for me to understand what was being conveyed so i could only focus on mechanically writing down the problems. An example of this is when we went over the component test it looked like a mismatch of partial derivatives to compare with one another and i got very flustered in class -> later i discovered it was simply came from the definition of the curl vector (del x F) and is just confirming Clairaut’s Theorem (equality of mixed partials - as talked about in calc3); once that clicked the whole idea made sense and instead of dread i had a satisfied understanding. Thus the professor posting all ...read more

Firstly, for exams make sure to follow exactly what your professor says will be good to study. our prof said to study lecture notes + tutorial + assignments. I messed up my first exam because i spent much more time doing the optional suggested problems from text book.. they are helpful but if you only payed attention to tutorial problems + lecture notes its almost guaranteed you will achieve at least a 80. secondly, If you are like me, you put things off until the last second. for exam 1 (coverage of the vector calculus portion -> almost entirely integrals) the materials is very chill and understandable .. right up until the last two sections where you must use spherical/cylindrical coordinates to parametrize surfaces and use that + many new surface integral methods to solve problems.. i...read more

[Taken online due to pandemic] OVERALL The first 40% of the course finishes some multivariate calculus topics from Math 200 (Calculus 3). The rest of the course gives a basic introduction into differential equations (types of DEs, solutions to DEs, and various ways of obtaining those solutions). In many ways, the DE portion of the course feels like starting a fully new subject whereas Calculus 1-3 felt like a continuation of the same ideas. If you enjoyed the problem solving aspects of Calculus 1-3, you will likely enjoy this course too. I found the DE portion a little less satisfying than the Calculus portion because it was not as visual or intuitive (at least not at the level we learned it). Trefor is a great professor and ran a great course. I recommend taking it with him if he's a...read more

Beyond good lecture notes, make a neat equation sheet with quick notes about how to solve problems in each section. This sheet will be great for midterms and you can refer back to it when studying for the final. Attempt assignments early so you leave yourself time to ask questions in office hours.