The paper should be on a topic that you find interesting and that involves some solid mathematics at a level that you feel comfortable with. It should be fairly specific, so that you can say something substantial about it that goes beyond vague generalities in ten pages or so. The material in it should not be so advanced that you have trouble understanding the mathematical content, but it shouldn't be "Mickey-Mouse" either. You'll need to do some research and some consultation with me and perhaps with other faculty to find a topic that's the right size and shape.
Here are some examples of the sorts of things you could write about.
Here are some of the topics from previous years: Resonance and falling bridges, Bernoulli processes, the fast Fourier transform, special relativity, the RSA cryptosystem, solving recurrences, time series and stochastic processes, algorithms for solving the minimal spanning tree problem, the theremin [an electronic musical instrument], resistor networks, game theory and the prisoner's dilemma, linear regression, non-Euclidean geometries, ray tracing and computer graphics.
Your topic might be related to a project you're doing for another course, but your paper should not just be something that you're also handing in for another course.
A good place to look for ideas is the Internet Mathematics Library (http://forum.swarthmore.edu/library/). Another place is the back issues of the American Mathematical Monthly. The last two years can be accessed on the web at http://www.maa.org/pubs/monthly.html. Earlier issues can be accessed at the JSTOR journal archive. Also, the Handbook of Mathematical Writing contains a list of papers that have won prizes for expository writing; you could browse through it and then look up papers that seem interesting.
Back to the Description of the Term Paper
Back to the Course Web Page