INNERCONNECTIONS IN MATHEMATICS

Catalog description

Prerequisites: MATH 3323 and MATH 3325, with grades of C or better, or see instructor Quantitative reasoning intensive course (Q1). This capstone course synthesizes a wide variety of courses both within and outside of the curriculum by way of ‘innerconnections’, a notion which shows that the connectedness of mathematics (something that is not apparent at a first glance of the list of the many subareas of mathematics) results from the way it evolves. All topics are introduced at their beginnings. For each topic, among innerconnections discussed are those associated with recent solutions of two major and seemingly distinct problems -- Fermat’s Last Theorem in discrete mathematics and Poincaré’s Conjecture in continuous mathematics. The course is particularly appropriate for: prospective teachers at all levels, for seeing basic subjects in contemporary and innerconnected settings; prospective graduate students, for seeing aspects of what lies ahead before specializing; students who are open to discovering interests in areas that perhaps they didn’t know exist or that they had ruled out as being far from their current interests.