Math 4301 - Honours Seminar (2010-11)

This course is the capstone course for the Honour's program. Although there will be some lectures, students will be asked to work independently with a supervisor on a project in an area of math.

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News (Last Updated Sept. 7, 2010)

• Sept. 7, 2010 Less than a week to go before classes begin! I added some more infomation to the web page.
• August 4, 2010 I added the course syllabus to the web page. See this information sheet for more details about the course.
• July 8, 2010 I put the class web page up. There isn't much here now, but check back in a month. We are still in the process of determining the format of this course.

LaTeX Resoures

As part of this course, you will learn how to use LaTeX, a typesetting program for mathematics. Here are some resources for you:

• LaTeX Introduction Handout
• LaTeX Homepage
• LaTeX Wikipage
• LaTeX Reference Sheet
• Sample files for you to play with (the best way to learn):
  • A paper written with LaTeX
  • The LaTeX source code

Math Talks (Resoures)

Here's some information to help you with your math talks:

• The Do's and Don'ts of Giving a Math Talk
  The slides from my in-class presentation.
• Latex Source Code
  The latex source code I used to make this talk. You will also need to download one more file (an image) to make the above code compile properly:
  • covering-n3.png
• A quick quide to Beamer
  A good place to hunt around for ideas and examples. Also, start with the wiki page.

Online Math Resoures

Since you will need to hunt out your own resources, here's how to find information.

• MathSciNet This is a mathematician's favourite tool! You need to be on campus this access this one. You can acess it at home, but you need to go through the library.
• Math arXiv PrePrint Server Preprints of papers, freely available. Since these papers haven't been refereed, treat with caution (many are fine, but there are incorrect papers on the arXiv).
• Google Scholar A good source of information, but lots of "noise". For math, MathSciNet is better.

• If you are looking a research topic, you may want to check out the following journals:
  • College Mathematics Journal
  • American Mathematical Monthly

• Still stuck finding a topic? You can always browse the list of Mathematics Topics on wikipedia to get you going.

Course Information

Course Supervisor: Adam Van Tuyl

Office: RB 2015
Office Hours: TBD
Email: avantuyl AT lakeheadu.ca

Place and Time:

Class: TTh 11:30-1:00 in RB 1045

Handouts

All class handouts are available as PDF files.

Course Information
Handout for first day

Guide to Writing Proofs
Handout on writing proofs

Grading Scheme

See the course handout for details

Important Dates

Sept. 13, 2010
First semester classes begin

Sept. 30, 2010
Proposal of Topic Due

Oct. 11, 2010
Thanksgiving (no class)

Nov. 23-25, 2010
Mini-talk

Dec. 6, 2010
First semester classes end

Jan. 4, 2011
Second semester classes begin

Jan. 27, 2011
First Draft Due

Feb. 4, 2011
Last day to drop without penalty

Feb. 4, 2011
Peer Review of Draft Due

Feb. 21-25, 2011
Reading Break

March 1, 2011
Second Draft Due

March 7-11, 2011
Practise Talk Session

March 17, 2011
Peer Review of Practise Talk

March 22-29, 2011
Final Presentations

March 31, 2011
Final Projects Due

April 4, 2011
Second semester classes end

April 6-16, 2011
Final Exams

Links

Lakehead University

LU Math Department

Adam's Home Page

Student Code of Conduct