Math 402: Dropping Homework Grades

You can earn the right to drop your lowest one or two homework grades. To drop each grade, you need to complete one of the following activities before April 23, one week before the last day of class. It doesn't matter when you do the activity -- your lowest grade from the whole semester will be dropped.

For the purpose of record-keeping, send email to your instructor after you have completed any of the activities and before the next day of class . 

Please note that there is no way to drop more than two homework grades!

• Find and read an article related to geometry in the mathematics journal The American Mathematical Monthly and write a paragraph or two about it.  With prior approval from your instructor, you can choose an article from another journal, for example a journal in mathematics education.
  
  
• Crochet or knit a hyperbolic plane. Instructions can be found in your textbook. If you choose this option, you will be asked to bring in your hyperbolic plane to class from time to time. However, you should find that having your own model makes it much easier to answer some of the problems we will ask in this course.  If you plan to do this, it will be most useful to do it near the beginning of the semester.  (There are probably other construction methods that, unlike paper, will result in sturdy and permanent models; if you have another idea for constructing a sturdy model, please talk to us about it.)
  
  
• Write a short story or poem about life in spherical or hyperbolic space. Please talk to your instructor first to make sure that you understand how this would make the world seem different. This should be about five pages in length.   For inspiration, you may want to look at  the books Flatland: A Romance of many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott and Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension  by Rudolf v. B. Rucker.
  
  
• Attend any two mathematics talks from the following list. After each talk, hand in an index card with the title of the talk and a brief description of what you understood. Note that you should not expect to understand everything in the talk you go to--nobody does--but you should at least try to understand the main idea of the talk. Look for talks which are introductory in nature. The majority of talks -- even many in the selected seminars -- are not suitable for undergraduates. Feel free to ask my advice; if the title doesn't make sense, the talk probably won't either. The department posts a weekly schedule of talks:   torus.math.uiuc.edu/cal/math/cal
  • Geometric Potpourri Seminar - some Tuesdays, 2:00 am  in 243 Altgeld Hall. (This seminar is especially recommended.)
  • Mathematics in Science and Society, some Tuesdays, 4:00 pm  in 245 Altgeld Hall.
  • The first lecture in the Trijzinsky Memorial Lectures, Arthur B. Coble Memorial Lectures, or Cairns Memorial Lectures.
  • Lectures and films sponsered by Matrix.
  • Other talks, but ONLY with prior approval from the instructor. In general, I will approve a talk exactly if:
    • It has some mathematical content
    • There is some hope that you will understand at least the first 10 minutes
  
  
• Design a lesson plan for high school or junior high students, exploring some aspect of the material that we have covered.
  
  
• Write a computer program or java applet demonstrating some geometrical idea.
  
  
• Explore an interesting geometrical subject on the web; write a paragraph or two description.
  
  
• Read a chapter in a geometry book for high school students. Compare and contrast it to what we have learned in this class.
  
  
• Work through a chapter from the Shape of Space by Jeff Weeks.
  
  
• Do a section from the book that we will not cover in class. This includes all of chapter 12,13,14, and 17-22. It also indlcudes sections 5.2, 11.3--11.6,15.2, 15.4, 16.5, and 16.6.
  
  
• This is only a short list of the possibilities. Think of something mathematical that interests you! But be sure to get prior approval.