Supervisions: Miscellaneous Information and Links

This page contains optional extra work (mostly aimed at IA Nat. Sci. maths), interesting links, and assorted other things.

Extra Work

For extra graph-plotting practice try questions Y1-6 from the graph-plotting questions. In order to check your answers as you go along, or to help if you get stuck on the overall shape of a function, it can be useful to try plotting graphs on a graphical calculator or a computer. The best program for the task is Pyxplot, but it only works on computers with sufficiently Unix-like operating systems (I think currently just Linux and possibly Mac OS X). There are several web-based graphing programs such as Wolfram Alpha which should work with any operating system and browser.
There is a sheet of extension questions for the IA Nat. Sci. maths course. I'm happy to mark any attempts made at these.

If you'd like to enthuse the general public about science, and/or play with science toys, then you might be interested in CHaOS. (And if you're interested in demonstrations of scientific ideas using everyday things, then the website of the Naked Scientists is also worth a look, especially the kitchen science section.)
The simulations at PhET are fun to play with, and mostly educational.
The what-if questions on the xkcd comic are well worth reading. (As is the comment on understanding quantum mechanics.)
Wikipedia is becoming surprisingly good these days, especially for subjects about which lots of people know enough to fix errors. See, for example, the page on group velocity, with the helpful animation.
There is an online textbook about Maxwell's equations which may be of help to IB Physics B students.
I've made a list of links which I use myself; these will be of limited use to anyone else.

Here are the Jesus College start-of-term IA Nat. Sci. maths test from Lent 2013, the (rather harder) tests from Lent 2014 and Lent 2015, and the (more reasonable) Lent 2016 test. There's also the Lent 2017 test, though this has a couple of mistakes: 1(d) is harder than I meant it to be, and 4(h) contains an unhelpful ambiguity. The Lent 2018 test is I think mistake-free, though it's still quite hard. Now also Lent 2019, and Lent 2020.
There are some ramblings on partial differentiation that may be vaguely relevant to some of you. (But I'm not sure that I'd express myself quite like that if I were writing it again, especially as some of the nomencleture is at odds with that used in the course. And there is at least one typographical error that I haven't fixed yet. Use with caution.)
The advice on approaching difficult questions has been moved to the advice page.