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 annotated proof illustrates how to format a theorem and proof and how to use guiding text to communicate the structure of the proof. Comments about formatting assume that students may not be using LaTeX. The text is an excerpt from the lecture notes for M.I.T.’s Principles of Applied Mathematics, on the topic of the pigeonhole principle.
Read more →This lesson plan and handout are for an 80-minute workshop to prepare students to write their term papers. During the workshop, an instructor provides guidance for choosing an appropriate focus for the paper (counterexample: “Everything I know about the Island of Corsica”); students talk with classmates to focus their topics; and the class discusses rhetorical differences among papers, presentations, and psets; the writing in two versions of the same paragraph; the structure of a paper; LaTeX; and acknowledging sources. From Mia Minnes’ Undergraduate Seminar in Logic.
Read more →This handout demonstrates how guiding text can be used to communicate the structure of logic or text.
Read more →Guiding text gives signposts to the reader: how is the paper or presentation structured? what strategy does this proof use? what is this paragraph about? The following examples illustrate how guiding text can be used to communicate the structure of a paragraph or a logical argument “We will prove that x2 = 2 by ruling out the other two possibilities: x2 < 2 and x2 > 2…” –R. G. Bartle and D. R. Sherbert, Introduction to Real Analysis 3rd ed., p. 41. “…Now assume that x2 > 2. We will show that it is then possible to find m ∈N such
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