Math 220 Essay Assignment 2
Due November 20th
Read any of the following articles below, and write a 1 − 2 page summary of
what you learned from the article. If it is a wikipedia article, you will probably
need to do some more searching to get more insight into the mathematics. You
are also required to find at least one other source on the topic of the article. If
you know of another mathematics article you would like to do instead, email
me about it, and I may approve it.
1. The Hilbert Hotel: An article about different sizes of sets, using the analogy of a hotel with infinitely many rooms.
2. Group Think: An introduction into finite groups.
3. Chances Are: An introductory article into probability.
4. It Slices, It Dices: An article about integral calculus.
5. The beauty of roots: an article about all the roots of polynomials of degree
at most 24 with coefficients ±1.
6. Hall’s marriage theorem and algorithm: An interesting theorem about
finding distinct representatives of a collection of sets.
7. Insolvability of the quintic: How do you find the zeros of a quintic equation?
8. Fundamental theorem of algebra: Which has no completely algebraic
proof.
9. Quaternions: Strange algebras which predate vector calculus, and arise in
computer graphics.
10. Regular 4-dimensional polytopes: What is a polychoron? How many regular polychora are there?
11. Google Page Rank: The mathematics behind what happens when you
click on the search button at www.google.com
12. Article on Sudoku and graph coloring
13. bounded gaps between primes: Work related to the twin prime conjecture.
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14. Navier-Stokes Equations: This is related to differential equations. How
does a fluid move?
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