Math 31B (Fall 2026)
Instructor: Professor Haotian Gu
Discussion Section Location: Geology 6704
TA Office Hours: Thursdays 3:00 - 4:00 PM in MS 6118,
or by appointment.
Student Math Centre Hours: TBD
You can find a course description through UCLA’s registrar. Official course materials are available on BruinLearn.
We will be using the textbook Early Transcendentals Single Variable Calculus, 4e by J. Rogawski. You can find detailed notes on what I plan(ned) to cover in discussions below, made available every Thursday afternoon.
The focus of this course is integration and infinite series; the primary goal of discussions is to reinforce the rules of integration and the rules of infinite series taught in lecture via example and repetition. This typically entails a pretty mundane loop: you (the students) are given a raw equation or an expression, then are told to solve or evaluate using the techniques seen in the days or weeks prior. Indeed, the act of pushing symbols around on a piece of paper or on a chalkboard, keeping track of a bunch of somewhat mystifying rules about which symbols go where and why, is not really anybody’s favourite recreational activity.
But in life, the symbols committed to paper are seldom just that. They may represent concentrations of drugs in a bloodstream, or populations of sharks in the Atlantic, or the temperature of a rocket’s chassis, or the positions of celestial bodies in the heavens above; regardless, they are bound to the same rules of mathematics, including the rules of calculus we aim to teach you this quarter. How you these rules, then, is up to you.