Leila Schneps Visiting Scholar 2007-2008 e-mail address: leila@math.jussieu.fr Home Page


Fall teaching:  Math 320, Computer Methods in Mathematics
Class Schedule: MWF 2-3, DRL Room 3C8
Office Hours: MTWTF 9-12, Office 4N43
Please feel free to come by during office hours or e-mail me any questions. If your program doesn't work and you can't figure out why and you can't make it to office hours, e-mail me your program and your question. If you do come to office hours to discuss a program, please either bring your laptop or e-mail me your program beforehand so we can look over it together.


Spring teaching:  Math 170, Ideas in Mathematics
Class Schedule: MWF 11-12, DRL Lecture Hall A1
Office Hours: M 9-11, Office 4N43
Homework
The midterm exam is scheduled for class time, 11:00-11:50 a.m., on Monday March 3, 2008. The midterm will also contain a take-home essay question (there will be a choice of topics) which will be distributed on March 3rd and due on March 5th.
Practice problems for the midterm
The midterm
Practice problems for the final

There will be office hours on Wednesday May 7, Thursday May 8, Friday May 9, and Monday May 12. These hours are officially from 9-12, but if you need help and those times are bad for you, please feel free to stop by later than that as well. Information about the final exam
(1) The date of the final exam is May 13, 2008. If anyone encounters a difficulty due to health or other major commitments, there will be a make-up final given in early September. Please note that it is absolutely forbidden by university policy to take the exam early.
(2) Mathematical content of the final. There will be 10 mathematical problems, with 4 covering some material from the first half of the course, taken from all the mathematics we covered with the exception of conic sections and cubic and quartic equations. These two topics will not be covered in the final exam. There will be 6 questions from the second half of the semester: these will concern set theory, with cardinals and countability, paradoxes, and aspects of math connected with RSA cryptography (Fermat's little theorem, Bezout's identity, binary numbers and of course, the cryptography method). Also know: Cantor's diagonal proof of the uncountability of the reals, the proof that N x N is countable and that the rational numbers are countable, the statement of Gödel's and Turing's Incompleteness theorems.
(3) There will be 6 essay questions on the exam of which you are expected to choose five. They are intended to take about ten minutes of time, covering one or two pages. They will cover aspects from a choice from the required reading: on the Cantor-Kronecker dispute and their differing philosophies, on Turing's life and work, on cryptography and on the issues of mathematics and discrimination, and on the other required reading texts from earlier in the term.
(4) The following question will appear on the exam: Describe one case of discrimination in mathematics that you have investigated.. Please prepare this question with personal work before the day of the exam. However, there is no need to bring notes or to memorize large amounts of facts. The point is to tell your tale with a feeling for the effect that discrimination and racism has had, in certain times and places.
(5) To help you with encryption and decryption problems on the exam, the following helpful information will be provided to you on your examination sheet: a list of prime numbers going up as high as you will need, to factor the encryption schemes values, and a list of the powers of 2, to help you convert the encryption exponent into binary. However, you do need to know how to do the conversion into binary yourself.