"Lecture" for Week 7

Term paper topics

Here are the topics chosen by my students in 2003 for the long final paper. The papers varied in depth and sophistication, but all the topics were suitable (whatever the deficiencies in implementation may have been in some cases).
  1. Who is Nicolas Bourbaki?
  2. The Philosophy of Rene Descartes
  3. Divine Logic [also about Descartes]
  4. Lifting the Veil [a very ambitious look at the "Hilbert problems"]
  5. A Brief History of Trigonometry
  6. The History of Reform Calculus
  7. Mathematics in World War II: The Enigma and Deciphering It [notable because every item in the bibiliography was a URL; I'm not recommmending that, but it worked in this case]
  8. Mayan Mathematics

Names