This page holds old Math 285 announcements -- with the most recent announcements at the top. If you have questions you can send me e-mail at galway@math.uiuc.edu
Don't forget there is also an archive of e-mailed class announcements.
Class will meet
You should visit our "COURSE WORKSPACE", at http://www-cm.math.uiuc.edu/coursespace/courses/MATH285G8.
When you go to the workspace you'll be asked for your User ID and your password. Your User ID is your Net ID followed by 285G8. For example, gimbal would have a user ID of gimbal285G8, while dsmith7 would have a user ID of dsmith7285G8. Note that 285g8 won't work, you need a capital G. Your initial password is the same as your user ID, so gimbal285G8 has password gimbal285G8.
After you go to the COURSE WORKSPACE, clicking "Options" will give you the "Change Passwords" page. You should change your password immediately, I'll check this in a few days -- I should not be able to log in as you!
Many students are using FTP (or fetch) to save their work on students.uiuc.edu or wherever. When you do so, please make sure you save and retrieve in text or ASCII mode. If not, you won't be able to open them later. We prefer you to save your work on the coursespace too. If you have any questions on how to do this don't hesitate to ask the instructor, or the course assistant Daniel Chen.
Also be sure to save and upload often to minize work loss when problems do occur.
On a related note, sometimes after you download a notebook you'll find that the computer does not recognize the notebook as being a Mathematica document. In that case, you should drag the notebook into the Make Mathematica application that might be available on the desktop. If Make Mathematica is not on the desktop, you can download it from this Make_Mathematica.bin link. After downloading Make_Mathematica.bin to your desktop, double click it to install Make Mathematica.
Finally, if your notebook is really messed up, you might be able to fix it with the Mathematica program Corruption.m, available from Wolfram Research. In addition to providing a program that might be able to repair a notebook, the Corruption.m link gives advice on other methods that might fix notebook problems.