Marcelo Mendes Disconzi

Current
This spring I am teaching MATH 3120 - Intro to PDEs.

I wrote the math outreach children's book Who Me? I'm a Mathematician Now! The book targets children at about ten years old and its goal is to get kids excited about math. It does so by being in part auto-biographical, telling the story of how I got interested in science and math as a kid, growing up in Brazil, and my trajectory to a PhD and career in the U.S. The book also discusses what it is like to be a professional mathematician. Along the way, the text gives some brain teasers (appropriate for the reader's age) and explains some basic math concepts like variables, equations, solutions, etc. The book is part of the Who Me? series, published by World Scientific, whose goal is to promote STEM fields among children.

I am happy to be a founding member of Vanderbilt's EMIT, a NSF funded research traineeship program whose goal is to establish an interdisciplinary graduate certificate program in the emerging field of multimessenger astronomy.

I am also happy to be part of the Vanderbilt-Fisk Noyce Program, a Robert Noyce Scholarship funded program designed to recruit, train, and support STEM majors who want to become K-12 science and math teachers. The project is a collaborative effort between Vanderbilt University, Fisk University, and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. Our goal is to create a sustainable pipeline for next generation STEM teachers to thrive in teaching.

Click here for some notes, videos of talks, useful links, and other teaching-related materials (for class notes, see below).

Resources and extra materials for Calculus
Sets of videos about calculus (and other topics) can be found on Ahmet O. Ozer's YouTube channel, on the 3blue1brown YouTube channel The Essence of Calculus (check out also their Divergence and curl: The language of Maxwell's equations, fluid flow, and more) and on the Khan Academy's YouTube channel Multivariable calculus playlist.

A three-volume Calculus textbook, by Jerrod E. Marsden and Alan Weinstein, with Student Guides, is available online for free.

If you learn things best by seeing tons of examples, you should have a look at the textbook "Schaum's outline of calculus" (or one of its variants), which contains more than 1000 problems solved. Similar "Schaum's outline..." are also available for other subjects such as linear algebra or differential equations.

Finally, if you struggle with simple algebra, make sure to check this list of common mistakes.

Class notes
Here are my class notes. For other types of notes (research notes, mini-courses, etc.), click here.

Introduction to partial differential equations (MATH 3120). Introductory notes to undergraduate PDEs. For the most part, this is a mathematically rigorous course. It also covers some more advanced material not usually seen in undergraduate courses. Some background material (e.g., calculus formulas in Rⁿ for arbitrary n) can be found here. For the class homework, click here. I am also making the source files available, which you can download and use at your discretion.

Partial differential equations (MATH 8110). Handwritten notes (Latexed notes to come...) of a graduate partial differential equations course. This is mostly a standard graduate PDE course, although I leave out some standard material (e.g., I only skim through Green's functions or the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem) but also cover some not-so-standard topics (e.g., negative Sobolev spaces in bounded domains or the Cauchy problem for Einstein's equations). For the class homework (with solutions), click here. I am also making the source files available, which you can download and use at your discretion.

Methods of ordinary differential equations (MATH 2420). Handwritten notes (Latexed notes to come...) of an undergradaute ordinary differential equations course. This is a standard ODE course whose target audience are engineers and the like.

Ordinary differential equations (MATH 2610). Rough notes of an undergradaute ordinary differential equations course. This is a standard ODE course whose target audience are math majors. Nevertheless, since Analysis is not a pre-requisite for the course, there is barely any epsilon-delta argument and all proofs are very simple, mostly computational in nature. Here are some complementary notes on direction fields and realted material. I am also making the source files available, which you can download and use at your discretion.

Multivariable calculus (MATH 2300). Handwritten notes (Latexed notes to come...) of an undergradaute multivariable calculus course. This is a standard multivariable calculus course closely following Stewart's textbook.

Previous courses
Below are the courses I previously taught at Vanderbilt University.

Term	Course	More information
Fall 23	MATH 2610 - ODEs	MATH 2610 course webpage
Spring 23	Not teaching
Fall 22	Not teaching
Spring 22	MATH 3120 - Intro to PDEs	MATH 3120 course webpage
Fall 21	MATH 8110 - Graduate PDEs	MATH 8110 course webpage
Spring 21	MATH 3120 - Intro to PDEs	MATH 3120 course webpage
Fall 20	MATH 8110 - Graduate PDEs MATH 2300 - Multivariable calculus	MATH 8110 course webpage MATH 2300 course webpage
Spring 20	MATH 3120 - Intro do PDEs	MATH 3120 course webpage
Fall 19	Not teaching
Spring 19	Not teaching
Fall 18	MATH 2420 - Methods of ODEs	MATH 2420 course webpage
Spring 18	MATH 2610 - ODEs	MATH 2610 course webpage
Fall 17	MATH 4110 - PDEs MATH 8110 - Graduate PDEs	MATH 4110 course webpage MATH 8110 course webpage
Spring 17	MATH 3120 - Intro do PDEs	MATH 3120 course webpage
Fall 16	Lecture 01 of MATH 2300 (Multivariable calculus)	MATH 2300 course webpage
Spring 16	Graduate Analysis II	MATH 6101 course webpage
Fall 15	Graduate Analysis	MATH 6100 course webpage
Spring 15	Lecture 07 of MATH 196 (Differential equations with linear algebra)	MATH 196 course webpage
Fall 14	Lecture 01 of MATH 208 (Ordinary differential equations)	MATH 208 course webpage

Below are the courses I previously taught at Vanderbilt University as a postdoc.

Term	Course	More information
Spring 14	MATH 234 (Introduction to partial differential equations) MATH 198 (Methods of ordinary differential equations)	MATH 234 course webpage MATH 198 course webpage
Fall 13	MATH 294 (Partial differential equations) MATH 155A (Accelerated variable calculus II)	MATH 294 course webpage MATH 155A course webpage
Spring 13	MATH 234 (Introduction to partial differential equations) MATH 196 (Differential equations with linear algebra)	MATH 234 course webpage MATH 196 course webpage
Fall 12	MATH 155B (Accelerated variable calculus II)	Course webpage

Below are the courses I previously taught at Stony Brook University as a graduate student.

Term	Course	More information
Spring 12	Lecture 04 of MAT 127	Lecture 04 webpage
Fall 11	Recitation R08 of MAT 126 Recitation R04 of MAT 122	Recitation webpage Recitation webpage
Summer 11	Lecture of MAT 123	Course webpage
Spring 11	Recitation R07 of MAT 125	Course webpage
Fall 10	Recitations R06 and R35 of MAT125	Course managed on Blackboard
Summer 10	Lecture 01 of MAT303	Course webpage
Spring 10	Lecture ELC90 of MAT123	Course webpage
Fall 09	Recitations R16 and R35 of MAT125	Recitations webpage
Summer 09	Lecture 01 of MAT303	Course webpage
Spring 09	Recitations R01 and R31 of MAT126	Recitations webpage
Fall 08	Lecture ELC90 of MAT123	Course webpage
Summer 08	Lecture 02 of MAT126	Course webpage
Spring 08	Lecture 04 of MAT127	Course webpage
Fall 07	Recitations R16 and R17 of MAT125	Recitations webpage
Summer 07	Lecture 01 of MAT211	Course webpage
Spring 07	Recitations R03 and R14 of MAT126	Course webpage, Recitations webpage
Fall 06	Recitations R01 and R03 of MAT131