Paper proposals
From Math111
Please submit your paper proposals just the way you would with a reading response. They can be just a few sentences long; just say what your focus will be and try to make it specific enough to show the makings of a good, concrete, short paper. The five-page limit is for real, so don't bite off more than you can chew.
(Example 1: Too vague and makes no argument)
- The Greeks were afraid of infinity. This is because of many contradictions of the infinite. They didn't need to be afraid of it, however, because their ideas would be made rigorous in the nineteenth century.
(Example 2: Sounds like a summary/biography)
- Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838–1926), English schoolmaster and theologian, is best known as the author of the mathematical satire and religious allegory Flatland (1884). As a scholar, Abbott was very broad, writing excellent works on a wide variety of topics. Flatland is an account of the adventures of A Square in Lineland and Spaceland. In it Abbott tries to popularise the notion of multidimensional geometry but the book is also a clever satire on the social, moral, and religious values of the period.
By the way, this example suffers from another major problem---it is completely plagiarized by cut-and-paste from online sources. Don't do this, on pain of roasting for all eternity in the land of no academic integrity.
(Example 3: Just right)
- Girolamo Saccheri worked on the logical status of the parallel postulate in the early eighteenth century, drawing largely on the mathematics of medieval Islam. The several co-discoverers of non-Euclidean geometry in the nineteenth century had the same tools and used the same logical setup as Saccheri, but were able to make the leap of recognizing the new non-Euclidean "worlds" as valid formal settings for geometry. I will argue that the changing status of the imaginary/complex numbers in the intervening time, via Euler's great successes and the influence of Gauss, made it possible to start seeing possibility in once-meaningless symbols and concepts.
Click the discussion tab above to add your proposal, using the heading "Proposal: Jane Doe".
