Projects/presentations should be on subjects related to chaos and/or fractals. 

  • They should match your interests beyond this course. 
  • Every project should have a major research/reading component. 
  • Dependent upon your interests and strengths, the presentation can be more "library" research and less mathematical or more mathematical and less "library" research.
  • One of the shortcomings of many college courses that are text-based (like ours) is students fail to see the subject of study in a broader world. This is one of the reasons I encouraged you to google on our laptop-based exam. Seeing our subject of study in a broader context is one of the TOP PRIORITIES of your projects.

Here are a few possible topics for your presentations.

  • Fractals and art (I have a nice reference)
  • Software to generate fractal landscapes and/or planets.
  • IFS/Affine transformation software (which is a major source of fractals, but we have not emphasized)
  • Fractals and architecture (taken, but she may have spots for team members)
  • Any of the 11 chapters of James Gleck's book "Chaos: The Making of a New Science" would be a take-off point for a project (you would start by reading the chapter, the book is in our classroom).
  • Here are many topics that students have undertaken at Union College: http://www.math.union.edu/research/chaos/ProjectTopics.html
  • Google: some combination of "fractal" "chaos" "project" and/or "exploration"

The project has 4/5 deliverables.

1. A moodle post with your topic description and team members. I will provide a moodle forum for projects. Please post there a title and one sentence description of your topic.. This description is due Friday of week 3 and is worth 5 points

2. A short paper covering your topic. For one person projects roughly 500 words plus graphics and citations. For two person projects roughly 750 words plus graphics and citations. For three person projects, roughly 1000 words plus graphics and citations. Worth 20 points.

3. A log of the time you devoted to the project with description of the activity. Worth 5 pts.

4. A presentation of your topic on Tuesday. The presentations will be Tuesday of Week 4. With 23 students in our class, we will have teams of size 1 to 3.  if we average 10 minutes per person we will be able to finish, with questions and transition time, in around 4 hours.

One submission per team (on Moodle) of each of 1, 2, and 4. Each student should submit their own log.



Last modified: Thursday, October 20, 2016, 7:50 AM