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Math 381 Summer 2013
Discrete Mathematical Modeling
Course Project
The course project is a major feature of Math 381. The project is to be done in groups of up to three students. You may work alone if you wish but I highly recommend finding other students to work with. If you need help finding groups, you can come to me and I will help you find other students with similar interests or ideas to work with.
Basic description: In the course project, you will choose a problem to investigate using discrete modeling tools. Often these problems come from real life situations. You are not necessarily expected to completely solve the problem, but to develop techniques to approach it, and perhaps an algorithm to arrive at an approximate solution. You should use tools discussed in class, as well as ideas you find from your own research to approach the problems. Patrick Perkins, a former professor for this course, has a nice list of some previous project topics to help you get an idea of the kinds of problems that are appropriate for this class.
Format: Your final paper should take the form of a research paper, as you would see in an academic journal. It should have an abstract, introduction, summary of previous work by other authors, description of methodology, code or pseudocode (if you used it), presentations of data (if needed), bibliography, etc.
Typesetting: You should typeset your work. I recommend using LaTeX to typeset mathematics. If you are not yet familiar with LaTeX, it's a great time to figure it out! This is industry standard for many fields that use a lot of mathematics, and is very easy to use. There are many different LaTeX primers out there to help you out. Fair warning: the hardest part about using LaTeX is installing it. But it is free.
Oral Presentations: In addition, you will be expected to give a 15-20 minute presentation of your project in the last week of class. Each group member is expected to speak during the presentation. You can prepare slides if you like (check out Beamer, the LaTeX version of powerpoint) or present on the blackboard. Attendance during these presentations is MANDATORY. For every day you miss, you will lose 10% of your final project grade.
Schedule: To facilitate your work on this project, you will be expected to turn in various stages of the project throughout the quarter. At each stage I will give you feedback and some advice about other techniques to approach your problem. The schedule is as follows:
- 8 July 2013: Project proposal due. You should have TWO ideas for projects, each of which you can summarize briefly. You need not go into deep detail yet, but have an idea of what you'd like to do and what tools you'll need to do it. I will provide some feedback and let you know which project I think is a better choice. NB: You don't have to listen to me. Do whatever makes you happy, but don't say I didn't warn you if you pick something either too easy or too hard.
- 15 July 2013: Revised project proposal due. At this point, you should have a fairly well fleshed out idea of what you're planning to do. You will have chosen a project, decided on a technique for modeling, and thought at least preliminarily about methods to approach the problem.
- 9 August 2013: First draft of project due. I will provide copious commentary.
- 19-23 August 2013: Oral presentations. We will schedule these later in the quarter.
- 23 August 2013: Final paper due in class.
Grading: Your project grade will be based only on the final paper. Grades will roughly follow this rubric. However, the intermediary deadlines are essential to producing good work, so any missed deadline will result in a grade reduction of 5% for each group member.