I am planning to apply for a Grad program in “transportation engineering” which requires the following:
- 1 year of college-level calculus
- 1 semester of elementary linear algebra
Now, I have taken the following courses in my undergraduate:
- Analysis & Linear Algebra – 1
- Analysis & Linear Algebra – 2
- Real Analysis
- Linear Algebra
The first two are introductory courses whereas the next two are advanced courses. Does these count as “1 year of calculus”?
Best Answer
Perhaps oddly, the apparently high-quality mathematics you studied (which surely helps serious understanding...) is not quite the same thing as facility with operational manipulation of those ideas, in computational and heuristic settings. A "calculus course" would entail lots of computational examples, which you might not see in a more serious course.
One analogue would be that a person studying "number theory" could conceivably fail to be acquainted with the multiplication table up to 15-times-15, etc.
So, bottom line, facility with basic-and-computational things is what you'll need. Nevertheless, the people looking at your application will almost surely imagine that a fancier version of calculus completely subsumes a more basic version. That's not at all necessarily true... but... :)