Math 170, spring 2008, Isabel Lugo

I am a recitation instructor for Leila Schneps' Math 170: Ideas in Mathematics class, in the spring of 2008..

The lecture for this class is on Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 11 AM to noon in DRL A1.

The recitations for this class are as follows:

Recitation 201: Tuesday, 8:30 - 9:30 AM
Recitation 202: Tuesday, 9:30 - 10:30 AM
Recitation 203: Thursday, 8:30 - 9:30 AM
Recitation 204: Thursday, 9:30 - 10:30 AM

These are in DRL 3N6. You should attend your assigned recitation.

Office hours: Tuesdays, 2 to 3 PM; Fridays, 10 to 11 AM; or by appointment. My office is DRL 4N27. E-mail me at isabel at math dot upenn dot edu.

Course documents

Most of the relevant documents for the course are on Dr. Schneps' web page. However, here are things I've prepared.

Answers to the midterm practice problems (February 28).

Presentation Schedule

You should look at Dr. Schneps' web page on presentations. Note that the list of books available there is not meant to be exhaustive. My own list is below.

If you haven't yet signed up to give a presentation, e-mail me at isabel at math dot upenn dot edu to do so. There will not be more than three presentations in any recitation; I'd like to keep this down to two when possible, although it won't always be.

Recitation 201 (Tuesday, 8:30)

Feb. 12: (none)
Feb. 19: (none)
Feb. 26: Xiang Lim, Orla Treacy
Mar. 4: (none)
Mar. 18: Hannah Cisper, Theodore Rawlings
Mar. 25: Caitlin Carr, Laura Kemp, Eliza Chute
Apr. 1: (none)
Apr. 8: Caitlin Slover, Raphaella Ricciardi
Apr. 15: Simon Bekker, Alyssa Kaplan, Max Bandier
Apr. 22: Jennifer Newcomer, Dan Frost, Bradford Blackmon
Apr. 29: Chris Casey, Stuart Tishman, Isabela Garcez

Recitation 202 (Tuesday, 9:30)

Feb. 12: Chris Hillard
Feb. 19: Jacob Singer
Feb. 26: Georgette Chryssanthokopoulos
Mar. 4: (none)
Mar. 18:(none)
Mar. 25: Allison Seelig, Sonie Guseh
Apr. 1: Travis Stier, Dana Rehnquist, Alyssa Mendoza
Apr. 8: Brittany Morgan, Elizabeth Kushel, Michael Cohen
Apr. 15: Andrew Carl, Amanda Margolis, Caroline Andersen
Apr. 22: Caroline Klapper, Lauren Hoffman, Arielle Eiser
Apr. 29: (none yet)

Recitation 203 (Thursday, 8:30)

Feb. 14: (none)
Feb. 21: (none)
Feb. 28: (none)
Mar. 6: Evan Medina
Mar. 20: Steven Lang, Alexandra Schuster
Mar. 27: Erica Palma, Kelcie Pinick
Apr. 3: Andrew Biros, Daniel Winston
Apr. 10: Patrick Gallagher, Patrick Kneeland
Apr. 17: Alexandra Drewicz, Min-Young Chung
Apr. 24: Francis Udler, Terrance Kennedy, Adriana Lopez

Recitation 204 (Thursday, 9:30)

Feb. 14: Amelia Cataldo, Chelsea Motzel
Feb. 21: Molly Johnsen, Naomi Tarlow, Alexandra Lippman
Feb. 28: Maia Lichtenstein, Andreas Schreiber
Mar. 6: Jessica Ludd, Madison Wojciechowski
Mar. 20: Melissa Gad
Mar. 27: Sarah Marcus, Amy Reams, Madeline Bauer
Apr. 3: Eric Fabara, Mike Cortese
Apr. 10: Julia Kahn, Rose Schlecker
Apr. 17: Maggie Borden, Tyler Russell, Noor Al-Rahim
Apr. 24: Elizabeth Baker

List of books

Here is a list of books that I recommend. This list, like the other lists available on Dr. Schneps' web site, is not meant to be exclusive; if you find something else not on this list that interests you that you'd like to be present on, that's fine. Most of them are books I've read myself, so there might be a certain bias there towards the sort of books I'm likely to read.

Non-fiction:

Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind
James Gleick, Chaos: The Making of a New Science
Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos
Bruce Schechter, My Brain is Open
Ben Yandell, The Honors Class
Keith Devlin, The Millennium Problems
Karl Sabbagh, The Riemann Hypothesis
Steven Strogatz, Sync
Robin Wilson, Four Colors Suffice
Duncan Watts, Six Degrees
John Allen Paulos, Irreligion
John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos
Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
Emanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant
Mario Livio, The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved
Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio
Douglas Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop
Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Chances Are: Adventures in Probability
Simon Singh, The Code Book
David Berlinski, Advent of the Algorithm
David Berlinksi, A Tour of the Calculus
Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
George Szpiro, Poincare's Prize
George Szprio, Kepler's Conjecture
Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity

Fiction:

Alexander Dewdney, Planiverse
Dionys Burger, Sphereland
David Auburn, Proof
Apostolos Doxiadis, Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Ian Stewart, Flatterland

More information about the class will be posted here or on Dr. Schneps' web site as it becomes available.