Undergraduate seminar in discrete mathematics

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

18.310 Principles of Discrete Applied Mathematics or 6.042J / 18.062J Mathematics for Computer Science; 18.06 Linear Algebra, 18.700 Linear Algebra, or 18.701 Algebra I; or permission of instructor.

This course is a student-presented seminar in combinatorics, graph theory, and discrete mathematics in general. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication is emphasized, with participants reading and presenting papers from recent mathematics literature and writing a final paper in a related topic.

This course fulfills the Communication Intensive in the Major Requirement

Most student lectures will be given from this textbook:
Aigner, Martin, Günter M. Ziegler, and Karl Heinrich Hofmann. Proofs from THE BOOK. Springer, 2014. ISBN: 9783662442043. [Preview with Google Books]

Students may give other lectures, pending instructor approval.

Each student in the course is expected to do the following:

In additional to the assistance you will receive from your peers and instructor, help with presenting and writing is available from the department's mathematical communication specialist. A lecturer in Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication is also available to help you. General help with writing and presenting (not specific to mathematics) is available from MIT's Writing Center. [Note: Not available to OCW users.]

Collaboration on preparing lectures is encouraged, as is the reading and deciphering of material. However, papers have to be written individually. Students are strongly discouraged to commit plagiarism. It is forbidden to copy any complete sentence from another source, including work submitted in past years or other courses. It is furthermore not acceptable to copy a proof, rewriting each line. A good strategy for writing a proof that appears elsewhere is to read and understand the source, and then write it from scratch the next day.

Some guidelines of what is and isn't allowed are available from Math Comm, including some examples.

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