Whirlwind Tour
of Math

Fall 2007
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Topology of Surfaces

This will be our first foray into advanced math. We'll be asking what it means for something to be a surface, and meet some familiar examples, such as the sphere and the torus (donut) and some more exotic ones, such as the M\"obius strip and the Klein bottle. The goal is one of the great mathematical results of 19th Century: the complete classification of compact surfaces.
As time and interest permit, we'll do our best to wrap our heads around the three-dimensional version of the problem (not even close to being solved - Perelman's recent proof of the Poincar\'e Conjecture is both a monumental piece of math and a baby step towards the answer). Another option is the study of knots.
http://cs.marlboro.edu/ courses/ fall2007/math_tour/ topology
last modified Saturday September 8 2007 12:47 pm EDT