The article “Maximum Overhang” by Mike Paterson, Yuval Peres, Mikkel Thorup, Peter Winkler, and Uri Zwick won the 2011 David P. Robbins Prize, an MAA Writing Award. This pdf of the article is annotated to point out to students how to write a mathematics paper. The annotations address the structure and content of an introduction, how to integrate equations, text, and figures, how to guide the audience through the content, how to cite, etc. The article addresses the question of how far a stack of blocks can extend from the edge of a table. It was published in the American
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This student handout includes examples of plagiarism of math writing as well as examples of acceptable paraphrasing of math sources. The handout is written in the style of and is meant to accompany M.I.T.’s Academic Integrity Handbook, which has similar examples from humanities contexts. The Academic Integrity Handbook is available at http://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/academic-writing/avoiding-plagiarism-paraphrasing
Read more →This e-mail to graders in a large communication-intensive math class provides guidance for how to recognize plagiarism and what to do if they read a term paper that they suspect contains plagiarism.
Read more →This assignment guides students to choose a term paper topic that will enable them to “add value” beyond what is provided in their sources (e.g., explaining the material clearly to an audience of students, synthesizing the presentations in multiple sources, etc.). The assignment, which is from M.I.T.’s Principles of Applied Mathematics, includes a list of suggested topics in discrete applied mathematics.
Read more →This one-page handout about acknowledging sources in mathematics papers addresses how to avoid using wording from sources and how to cite information or wording. Examples are included (with citation).
Read more →Finding sources The MIT Libraries Mathematics Guide has links to databases, electronic books, and other resources for searching the literature of mathematics. The Dartmouth College Library Mathematics Research Guide has links to databases, journals, and other resources for searching the literature of mathematics. Your librarian may be happy to visit your class to show students how to search the mathematics literature. A handy trick: if you visit journal websites through your institution’s library account, notice the url. You may find that you can access journals more quickly by simply adding a string like .libproxy.[yourinstitution].edu to the url. You will still
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