Course Projects

Instructions

The three main projects for the term are listed below. These projects are intentionally open-ended: that's how life is. I expect you, as graduate students, to be at the level of working on somewhat vague problems that have no single correct answer.

One of my jobs as your instructor is to give you guidance, so if you have questions about the projects, or you need further direction, please ask me. Here are some of the criteria that I will use in evaluating your work:

• Correctness. This is the sine qua non!
  • The mathematics involved must be valid.
  • The computer code (Maple, LaTeX, html) must be free of errors.
• Clarity. Your work should be well-organized, executed with good style, and appropriate for its intended audience.
• Creativity.

Quality work benefits by going through multiple drafts. I hope that you will start working on these projects right away. As your skills improve over the course of the semester, you will be able to refine and improve your work.

Project A

Make yourself a home page on the World-Wide Web. Your page must contain at least one image (for instance, a picture of yourself) and at least one link.

Project B

Look through the Maple Help Browser, pick out some item or package that interests you, and write a Maple lab (suitable for undergraduates) that illustrates and explains that topic. The topic should be something beyond what is covered in the CalcLabs with Maple V manual.

Some examples of possible topics are: Gröbner bases; Euler-Maclaurin summation; the Mellin transform; permutation groups; amortization schedules; the simplex algorithm; projective geometry; Sylow subgroups; p-adic numbers; normal forms of matrices; Fermat numbers; Euler's constant; continued fractions; Bessel functions; fitting data via least squares. There are lots and lots of other possibilities. Check with me if you are in doubt about the suitability of your topic.

Project C

Write a paper in LaTeX about some interesting topic in mathematics or mathematics education. The paper must include some mathematical formulas and some graphics.

The paper can be either elementary or advanced as long as the exposition is appropriate for the intended audience. The length should be appropriate for the topic; about 7 to 10 pages with default page set-up parameters is a rough target.

Here are some possible scenarios for your paper:

• an article suitable for publication in the undergraduate mathematics newsletter;
• a profile of a faculty member in the mathematics department;
• a paper you are writing for another mathematics course (please check with me about this first).

Comments to Harold P. Boas.
Created Aug 28, 1996. Last modified Sep 3, 1996.