Administrivia

Information Sheet

Please fill out the infosheet in Advice. On the front mention the courses you’re taking. In the first entry, tell me the name of the course. This information is useful in designing your course project. If your schedule changes then a new sheet can be filled in.

Room Keys and Rules

You will get a key to 102, our lab, as soon as they arrive. The rules for the security of the lab are as follows:

How you earn your grade

Your work for MA198/CS199 Hypergraphics is evaluated to support a "contract grade." That is, if you complete the mutually agreed upon course project then you'll get one of 3 kinds of A. If you do not complete the project some other arrangement needs to be negotiated. Completing the project consists in

You are welcome to think about a possible project and discuss it with me at any time. It can be "out of the blue sky" at first. If you submit an idea for a project as a pre-proposal then we can design a plan of study and acquisition of skills needed to conduct the project. If you don’t, and have participated in sufficiently many (not all, necessarily) tutorials and mini-projects, then we can design a project based on these prerequisites.

There will be many opportunities to examine previous projects in the course, and it is always possible to continue and improve upon the work started by prior students. At any event, the sequence of events is this

Journal and Website

You will (learn) how to keep an intellectual journal. (See Advice.) This is not a diary, and it is not a set of class notes taken during a lecture or demo. That information goes into your private notebook and is nobody elses business. All professionals keep a journal. Patent defenses have been won on the basis of well kept journals. Data in lab journals are the primary basis for priority of discovery in science. Leonardo DaVinci kept supert journals. But don’t write in mirror script. Therefore, a journal has these attributes

Keeping a journal has these benefits

Lab Machines

It is important to understand that when you first log into a Mac it creates a personal directory for you which is inaccessible except from the keyboard of that machine. But you and I need to be able to access your work from anywhere, including over the web. Therefore you must keep your work in your SVN repository. That way you either checkout or update an existing copy of your work on any machine you happen to be working on. There is a separate tutorial on using SVN.

Text Books:

There cannot be an even remotely adequate single textbook for a tutorial course like MA198. So, without being too facetious, here is our "text book"

Conduct of Course, in thirds:

There is also a syllabus, but this is a volatile web document that is more useful as a record of what has already happened than what is tentatively scheduled to happen in the future.

First Third

Introduction to mathematical visualization, lessons, tutorials.

Second Third

More tutorials, but Seminars for student reports replace most lessons.

Third Third

Everybody works on their projects, interrupted only by specialized tutorials on a subject of interest to more than two students.

Finals Week