Math Majors' Seminar

Course: Math xx94 - Majors' Seminar/Writing Workshop/Senior Project (Spring 2015)

Instructor: Dr. Hoa Nguyen (hnguyen5@trinity.edu)

Syllabus

Speaker Schedule

Course Objectives:

  • Attending talks is an important way to find out what you can do with your math major, which areas of research interest you, how different parts of mathematics are related to each other and how math can be applied to solve problems.
  • Gleaning information from research talks is an acquired skill since it is not easy to follow a presentation that is new to you. So you should at least try to follow the thread of the talk.
  • Furthermore see if you can learn something from the talk. It can be a definition, a theorem, an algorithm, an application or even an interesting idea. Over time you'll be able to accumulate quite a lot of knowledge.
  • By the end of the talk, you should try to answer the following: What question(s) is the speaker trying to answer? Why are they important or interesting? Can I relate the ideas in the talk to something that I understand? To motivate you to keep up with the talk, these questions will be handed out at the beginning and collected by the end of the talk.
  • Try to ask the speaker at least one question per talk. You can either raise your question during the talk or privately afterwards. The act of formulating an interesting question is a worthwhile exercise and can help you get more out of the talk. Your participation will be graded.

The seminar is also a good place where junior and senior students can present their projects. To help students improve their presentation skills and get feedback about their talks, a survey will be handed out to the audience including faculty and other undergraduates and will be delivered to the speaker at the end of the talk.  

Rubrics, Guidelines and Samples for

Other resources:

Check out Math Majors' Seminar in Spring 2014.