A guide to final exam preparation for 2025 (Spring) PHYD38
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The upper limit of handwritten (and handwritten only) notes is 8 pages. 
Everyone is encouraged to have at least a few pages of notes. 
You may have noticed that preparing them makes them virtually useless, since 
you then remember the important things very well and don't need to look them up. 


Review Tutorials file. 
Review the recordings from previous years, if you feel it's helpful. 
There are some deviations from 2025 course there.
Review the quasiblog, skipping these subjects: 

☼ Historical details about the theory of flight
☼ Dog and duck problem
☼ Perturbation eqs, for R3B problem (Hill's approximation) w/radiation pressure 
☼ Lorentz system, s" = s(1-s^2) -v^q numerics, and any .py or .pro programs
☼ Derivation of results about turbulent jets (but be aware of main results), 
  any information about contrails of moving airships
☼ Proof of superstability of Netwon's method
☼ Paper on nonlin. waves in galaxies
☼ Unofficial history of nonlinear series acceleration

Let's now discuss the Quiz. We have done a good job covering both the textbook
and many additional topics. This means that the Quiz will cover 12 chapters 
from the textbook, with exceptions noted below, and occasional other subjects 
covered in the quasiblog (just a few questions).

Expect 60+ questions. About 1/3 of the quiz will be from the first 2 parts of 
the book which we studied before midterm (ch. 1-9). Use the materials posted 
before the midterm to prepare for that. Concentrate on the notions, relations 
and information from the textbook. 
The rest will be mostly the textbook material from later chapters, with 
literally a few questions from the posted mini-project writeups, say, one to 
two per writeup.

The written problems:

There will be 2x more work in this category than during the midterm but 3x
more time. So this exam should be relatively more relaxed. 

Just like the quiz, the final is mostly (at least 2/3) from the post-midterm 
material, and won't involve calculations of things discussed in student projects. 
The difficulty level of exam is generally the same as assignments and midterm, 
but amount of work is often less than in assignments. 

I'll mention the things that you don't have to know from Strogatz(2024) textbook 

1. Anywhere you see an electric circuit (except simple RC cirquit we encountered
early in the course), or a laser, skip that problem or explanation. 

2. skip the biology of insects in 3.7 

3. skip the fireflies in 4.5

4. I recommend section 5.2 

5. skip 5.3, that's extracurricular activity (-:

6. refresh your knowledge of p. 150-151. If you are asked to linearize the 
equation by substitution of small deviations from the fixed point, make sure 
you are expanding aroubd that point, e.g, sin x = x -x^2/2 +x^4/.... 
should not be analyzed just for small |x|<<1. Such an expansion/linearization 
will go through, because 0 happens to be a fixed point, but produce random 
outcome if you need to analyze the fixed point at x*  = 1, pi or something 
else than zero. Same with the system  exp(-x) = 1-x+x^2/2-... Always plug in 
x = x* + h (h being the small deviation of which only lowest power is kept) 
with a correct x* and redo linearization at each fixed point separately.  

7. skip both 8.5 and 8.6,  hysteresis, Josephson junction, and coupled oscill.

8. start reading chapter 9 from 9.2, skip the beginning

9. skip 9.1 cause we skipped waterwheels, and 9.6 (using chaos for cryptography 
was discussed in one of the projects but there won't be any specific questions 
about it in the exam)

10. The only topic you need to know from Ch.12 is the definition of attractor 
and specifically the Roessler attractor you encountered in term work.
BTW, the first time we encountered attractors was p. 359.  
We haven't discussed other attractors. Thus they can't pop up in the final exam.

11. skip Ch.13


Remember also that our textbook has lots of exercise problems to practice your 
knowledge, answers to odd-numbered problems are in the companion book on our 
auxiliary page. Please use both kinds in your preparation.