Home Page for Math 296

Skeletal descriptions of classes and links to all TeX'd handouts

This is the home page for Math 296&F1, "Introduction to Mathematical Research". This class meets for the Spring 2002 semester on MWF 2 in 441 Altgeld.
The newsgroup for this course is accessible from this webpage: uiuc.class.math296
My intention was to provide, at the very least, an archive for all of the TeX-d handouts in the course and a guide to the semester, class-by-class, but I've been so slothful that I will compress the first 11 class meetings and four weeks into one lump.

Class Diary

The linked handouts include:
  • Class Organization
  • Questionnaire
  • How to Solve It guide
  • Resources for Research
  • UIUC Math Dept Organization
  • NSF Math Organization
  • UIUC Math Links
  • UIUC REU's
  • NSF REU's
  • Erdos Number Project
  • Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics
  • Sloane's On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
  • Plouffe's Inverter
  • The first assignment was to find some problem or theorem that you liked and (i) write it down with a proof, then (ii) change it in some way and solve the changed problem, then (iii) change it in some more substantial way so you couldn't solve it. There have also been general reading assignments in the required books. On F 2/8, we made a "field trip" to the mathematics library. Other trips will happen later. This is the line-up of speakers for the first go-round of presentations and the "guest speakers" while I'm at Oberwolfach Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach :
  • M 1/28 Greg Dahlberg on Bell's Theorem.
  • W 1/30 Aleck Johnson on the Thue Sequence.
  • F 2/1 Michael Baym on the Rudin-Shapiro Sequence.
  • M 2/4 Dave Dueber on the Thue Sequence.
  • W 2/6 Dusty Grundmeier on Cardinality and Cantor's Theorem
  • M 2/11 David Piet on n-dimensional volume
  • W 2/13 Tom Hatta
  • F 2/15 James Spencer
  • M 2/18 Prof. Bruce Berndt on Ramanujan
  • W 2/20 TBA
  • F 2/22 296 alum Tasha Fast on a generalization of Golomb's sequence
  • M 2/25 Kevin Saff
  • W 2/27 Matt DalSanto
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