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Heh, all these years I thought it was just me.

Hated sophomore ODEs.

Much later took a mathematical physics course that actually taught me ODEs. Also took a year of applied mathematics that really solidified PDEs and taught me complex analysis. Took another graduate course in calculus of variations that was useful. Another very senior-level physics course taught me greens functions, method of steepest descent, etc.

The Physics and Applied Math profs were vastly better at teaching Math than the Math profs. Only real problem was in the freshman Physics courses where they taught you sloppy vector calculus before you'd seen that from the freshman calculus courses (and generally if you tried to pick up Math directly from the Physics courses that were teaching concepts it was all sloppy physics math -- it worked but you never quite understood why...)




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