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Haven't seen the videos. I first came across this stuff in a crank review on slashdot, of all places. I'm not saying that the material is wrong or not interesting in its own right, but it has nothing to do with mathematical mainstream and gives students the wrong impression about what methods...

I've seen the book. There are some pretty controversial justifications to say the least. I suppose something like that can be interesting if one hasn't seen any properly done planimetry before? If you don't believe me, check out any number of downright bad (by the conventions of the genre)...

Is it just me or is "Geometry" a pretty crazy course with zero intersection with the rest of the mathematics and based on the lecturer's self-published book?

IMO you will still need to study/revise because of the low pass rates, and the more maths you learn the more retarded/irrelevant the actuarial curriculum will appear - so you will likely no longer want to subject yourself to it.

Actually this is a fiction that university departments like to tell... Developing most software is indeed little more than "programming" together with a few vague rules of thumb. If you could teach yourself to program on your own, then doing a computing degree is a waste of time - you will...

The purpose of scaling is usually to lower the standard for the course / degree in such a way that it remains unseen when measured by students' marks. The exams themselves still appear reasonable too.

Search for '<book name> djvu' in google.

Completely different material but great book: Amazon.com: Abel's Theorem in Problems and Solutions: Based on the lectures of Professor V.I. Arnold (the Kluwer International Series in Engineering & Computer Science): V.B. Alekseev, Francesca Aicardi: Books Self-contained and does a superb...

There is no reason why you can't. One way to do it is to convince the lecturer to sign waiver of prerequisites form. The best way is probably to get several books and start reading over the break so that you can say something sensible about the subject at that time! They use this: Amazon.com...

I think the reason you think Discrete maths is good is because it's the first course where they try to emphasize formal proofs, unlike useless computations that you would've seen in school and to a large degree maths 1a. If so, you are likely to actually like the 3rd year 'pure' courses where...

Arnold thinks that it brought about teaching of calculus where neither student nor teacher understand what's going on geometrically and simply apply syntactic rules. PM me if you want an electronic copy.

Not surprising about DEs... This is the only intro book I've seen which rightly treats them as dynamical systems and makes the subject worthwhile (it's worth reading the first chapter just for the rant against Leibniz notation): Amazon.com: Ordinary Differential Equations: V. I. Arnold: Books

I think we had a discussion on this somewhere before - the question clearly demonstrates that HSC maths is essentially harmful as the only thing it teaches people is to mindlessly apply rewrite rules to formal expressions without any understanding whatsoever.

Game development is way more challenging than the vast majority of business programming, especially if one is working on core code.

The best degree for games programming is honours in pure maths + a computer science minor.

Absolutely. Plus most of finance "theory" they teach in undergrad becomes self evident if you have the right maths background. For example "APT" is just a trivial statement that for a linear map L:X->Y any y in Y either belongs to Im(L) or its orthogonal complement or that Im(L) is a linear...

I'm saying that neither HSC 4U nor actuarial studies has much bearing on modern mathematics. To get some feel for the ideology and methods of modern mathematics one should study something along the lines of the following program: Harvard Mathematics Department : Graduate Information

Ignore this advice at your own peril. Even a quick perusal of individual academics' publications lists reveals SISTM to be the bastion of ignorance that it is. UNSW School of Information Systems, Technology & Management - Research - Academic Research Interests

Indeed, marketing that various departments engage in is outright dishonest and students have pertty much no way of seeing through the spin.

Actuarial studies has essentially no maths in the modern sense (not even linear algebra!) and introduces an assortment of poorly explained topics from statistics (time series, brownian motion, discrete markov processes, GLM etc). HSC program has no bearing on "maths" as it is understood today...