Notes for the class
The rough draft notes (in progress) for the class are being shared on Ed and will be posted here at the end of class.
Final projects
The final projects will consist in
- a 35 minute presentation (plus 5 minutes for questions and comments),
- a write-up (4-8 pages)
on a topic that you choose in consultation with me.
Goals
The goals of these projects are that you learn a topic that interests you in depth, that you produce a nice expository note on it that can be of use to people trying to learn about the topic in the future, and also that you get practice presenting. Especially if you have not had a lot of practice presenting yet, this can be hard--you will need to make hard choices as to what to present and how to fit a whole hard topic in 35 minutes.
In both presentations and write-ups, you should focus not just on reproducing a proof or definitions, but focus particularly on explaining the intuition, the main ideas and pointing out the subtleties. Then others can really benefit from your time spent understanding the topic and your resulting insights.
Here is the suggested list of possible topics. You can also suggest other topics.
Write ups and slides
You can put all the write-up and slides in a shared dropbox folder. I will link the files on this webpage from there, so that you all have access to replace updated versions of your files whenever.