[ramboacid]

Hi,

Please pardon my possible cluelessness in the rest of this post, but I need some advice.

As I and a couple of my friends are exhausting the Chemistry curriculum at my high school, we plan to pursue an independent study program in physical chemistry with a teacher at our school who has a doctorate in Physical Chemistry. She is very interested in teaching us as she has been thinking about developing an introductory course in p-chem for students at our school. Our school offers courses in general chemistry (AP equivalent), organic chemistry, and biochemistry, with essentially p-chem and organic chemistry being left out.

I have been reading the boards searching for p-chem discussions, and the gist of what I have found is that p-chem is quite rigorous in terms of the subject matter an the mathematics, so I was wondering how much p-chem we can learn with only basic math.

I have a math background that consists of single variable calculus and multivariable calculus. However, no linear algebra or multivariate differential equations . But, I would vouch for myself in terms of general chemistry, as I have read Chemical Principles 4th Ed by Atkins and Jones by myself, have done plenty of practice problems, and am sure that I have mastered the concepts there inside, except for the quantum (I am still a little rusty on that). I have also done some US Chemisty Olympiad National Exam sections and can get 55+ out of 60 most of the time, if that is a good measure of anything.

My question is what topics are feasible for a high school student with my background to study, as the math requirement may limit our discussion? Is it feasible at all to pursue this? I have looked at MIT opencourseware and have found that our p-chem independent study may contain some inorganic as well, if that makes a difference.

[Jorriss]

With single and multivariable calculus you could probably cover a lot of thermodynamics but the instructor would definitely need to tailor the course to bring up the math in a sensible way.

A lot of chemical kinetics and kinetic theory of gases could also be discussed.