Papers

This term, we are going to make you do two papers. The first one should be at least five pages long, double spaced, and the first draft is due on October 21. It can be about any topic in discrete mathematics (using a fairly generous interpretation of this field), and should include at least some material which is not covered in the course. It should have a coherent introduction, and be written clearly. The final paper should be ten pages long, and may be an extension of the first one, on the same topic.

The basic idea is that you should take some topic preferably one not covered in the course, and imagine that you were to give a lecture on it, which would convey to someone of reasonable intelligence but no particular knowledge of the field what the subject was about and at least one interesting and non trivial result in it.

For those of you who are juniors or above this can be your phase 2 paper though you may have to work on it some for that others can take a seminar somehow in perfecting it.

Among possible topics are:
hashing
matching theory
other error correcting coding schemes
the new primality testing algorithm
novel linear programming algorithms
new ideas on linear programming and complexity
new linear programming algorithms

List of topics chosen in 2001