A level further maths

Any resources that I can use do l learning / improving topics I suck at????

Practice. It's the only way. Just practice.

I'm a maths undergrad so if you give me specific topics you're struggling with I can try pointing you to some resources if what's targeted at A-level students isn't cutting it.

Reply 2

JibberJam

Original post by Filthy Communist

Practice. It's the only way. Just practice.
I'm a maths undergrad so if you give me specific topics you're struggling with I can try pointing you to some resources if what's targeted at A-level students isn't cutting it.

Roots of polynomials.. quartics… summing series

Reply 3

t3rminator

revisely has good topic videos, MADAS maths is great for practice questions and helps build foundations and alevelmathsrevision.com has decent questions too

Reply 4

Filthy Communist

Original post by JibberJam

Roots of polynomials.. quartics… summing series

Oof, unfortunately, those are probably the three topics in AS further pure that you will never see at uni, so I can't really help you with resources.

However, I can point something out which you may not have noticed about sums of series. You are given the formulae for r^2 and r^3, no need to worry about those. r^0 is obvious. That leaves r^1 you may be struggling with. Notice that for all n, you get a triangular number. Put the terms into two right angled triangles and arrange like so:

You can see that the area of these two triangles is 4 * 5. You can also see that this pattern will continue, so the area will be n(n+1). Halve that, you have 1/2 * n(n+1), there you can now derive the formula at a moment's notice.

Being a maths undergrad I should say that THIS IS NOT A VALID PROOF. But you'll learn how to prove it later this year.