Messages
(This only concerns a couple of Norwegian-speaking students.)
Jeg har rettet de innleveringsoppgavene som har kommet inn i ettertid, beklager at det tok s? lang tid. P? min kontord?r (12. etasje, rett til h?yre for ekspedisjonen) er det limt opp mapper der dere kan hente dem.
– Nils
I should maybe have been a bit clearer:
- This week has only seminars. No lectures.
- The reason why the 'Time and place' document says different, is that I do not have write access to it. Sorry. Neither can I add the 23rd to that document.
- Nils
The final review lecture:
- Wednesday 23rd, 0815, same auditorium. Topic: the autumn 2011 exam and requested topics (matrix inverses and envelope theorem as of now).
- I have reserved it for three hours to be sure we have time enough.
- Unless requested otherwise, I will start with the autumn 2011 exam.
The Akademika gift card:
- Drawn at ticket 05. If the owner does not show up before the 23rd, then 06 will be the runner-up.
More messages.
- Problems for next week posted.
- For tomorrow, I've had the following requests: Kuhn--Tucker, envelope theorem, matrix inverse. I will first give an overview and then start on these topics; any leftovers will be covered in two weeks.
- Turns out you might choose between Wednesday 23rd and Thursday 24th for the final lecture. I have already announced 23rd, but if there is a large majority voting for 24th tomorrow, we can change it, in particular if that is more compatible with your exam dates.
- Due to an injury, this week's lectures will be given by none other than the one and only Knut Syds?ter.
- I propose review lectures Thursday 3rd ('Maths 2 in a nutshell + requested topics') and Wednesday 23rd (a problem set).
- Please forward topics requests to the contact students. Contact students: please e-mail me a summary of requests by ... April 30th?
- Your yellow lottery tickets: to be drawn the 3rd. (I hope to be back by then. Oh, and I do read e-mail.)
- Your term papers: when I get myself to Blindern. I might leave them in the reception, 12th floor (in which case I will announce it here).
- More term papers? I think there is still an envelope on my office door, you migh put them there and I'll pick up when I get back. If there is none such, ask the reception to put them in my mailbox.
There is only one week left of regular teaching. I have put up two review lectures, but I am not sure if it is a good thing to have them both in week 18. I was thinking of having one review lecture covering theory and one covering a problem set.
For next week (Wednesday or Thursday), I want you to form an opinion on
- is the one-lecture-theory and one-lecture-problems format OK?
- if so, should any of these be postponed til, say, Wednesday 23rd?
- topics for a review lecture.
I have already gotten the feedback that a few of you would like to have the envelope theorem explained again.
– Nils
- I'll collect your term papers at the upcoming lecture.
- Problems for next week posted.
The solution for the spring 2011 exam -- to be covered tomorrow at 0915 -- had a dead link. Corrected by now.
As agreed upon yesterday, I have assigned an extraordinary problem set, namely the spring exam 2011, and an extraordinary lecture: Wednesday 11th at 0915 (not 0815) to review it -- there will be no new topics covered that hour, so it should rather be counted a 'seminar' than a lecture.
Also, there will be a voluntary term paper submission: Submit either that one (i.e. spring 2011) or autumn 2007. Please spend two minutes reading the following:
- It is voluntary to submit anything at all. It will not enter any official record whether you have submitted it, or if you did, any assessment on it. This is purely for feedback purposes.
- I will not grade it completely, rather give feedback (like: inaccurate, off the mark, too brief justification, much longer than required for an exam).
- As the purpose is to prepare for an exam, I do not see the point in writing any long beautiful calli...
Lots of messages. Please read:
- Correction to today's first problem: Please replace the constraint for x^2 + y^2 to be at most 2 (not 1). Then (-1,-1) solves the problem.
- Topics for tomorrow's lecture: concavity/convexity of composite functions, and then linear-quadratic constrained optimization with an application to finance.
- I will put up a voluntary term paper problem set, or maybe even two. Question: Does anyone want an extra lecture Wednesday after Easter for one such problem set? I will discuss with you tomorrow. If so, I will cover the spring 2011 exam in that lecture; you might do that as a voluntary term paper. (An alternative would be the autumn 2007 set).
- Midterm evaluation forms. I have been informed that this course is subject to midterm evaluation. Will spend ten minutes of tomorrow's lecture on that as well.
Problems for next week posted, but there seems to be a delay in the publishing system right now, so it might not be available to you yet.
Wednedsday's lecture will be more than just 'review' of Lagrange's method. I will cover multiple dimensions as well, something not covered in ECON2200.
- Congratulations, you have now seen so much of the course that you can do (with a bit of struggle!) one entire old exam. I have therefore made available a lot of them.
- Try not to look at autumn 2007, or anything newer than spring 2009, as I will put these up for a later stage, at a time when you can allocate 3 hours and see how far you get.
- Problems for next week are available: 58 and 66 from the compendium, and the entire spring 2009 exam. For problem 4(a), you need to use partial fractions: write 1/(u(u-1)) as A/u + B/(u-1).
Tomorrow's lecture will go through a typical exam problem-type from linear algebra, before reviewing min/max. Even if you are comfortable with the latter, you might want to catch the first 45 minutes.
- Week 9 is teaching free. No lectures nor seminars.
- Problems for the seminar of week 10 posted.
- In addition, something to keep you busy during the teaching-free week: One of Arne Str?m's term paper problem sets , skip Problem 3 where we have not yet covered the theory.
- And also: Write down a few matrices and multiply them until you have the algorithm by your fingertips. I will assume by week 10 that you are able to multiply matrices.
The contact students are Kristine Gran Martinsen and Astrid Midtun. I have put up a mailing list at econ4120-contactstudents@econ.uio.no , which is readable by them (and them only).
I will try to organize a meeting with them in the close future, so I would ask you to leave feedback either by e-mail or otherwise. It might be helpful if you then indicate to them whether you have taken the course ECON2200 here at this university – those who haven't, might be a more heterogeneous group.
Re problem 28 (i.e. the 'fairly large' one): I realize I have not yet covered the implicit derivative formula – it should be well known from ECON2200 though. You will need this for 28 part (e); there, you define G(x,a) = [the same formula as for g(x)], and use the implicit derivative formula to find the derivative.
I put up problems for next week. Also from the compendium, and at least one is fairly large.
There are of course lots of 3-hour exam sets (which are more realistic in terms of workload). I intend to save them for later, when it makes sense to allocate three hours and see what you can do in that time frame. If you want to start on that already, you might look up the course page for a previous semester (like autumn 2011), but I would recommend that you leave the more recent problem sets untouched as I intend to assign a few of them later.
Problems for next week are expected to be, from the problem collection: 43, 49, 88 (a), 94, 100 (a--b) and 126. I might have to adjust for what we cover by tomorrow's lecture.
[removed message, was intended for a different course]
... and they are all taken from the exam collection of old exam problems. (Published on the course web pages.)