The purpose is for the presenting students to develop their research and
presentation skills, and for the students in the audience to develop their
critiquing skills. Each presentation will last 20 minutes, and there will be
2 each recitation starting the third week of class. Presentations are
individual, unless the class turns out to be very popular in which case we
will have group presentations instead.
How do I go about a presentation?
- Select your topic (see below) and a delivery date. Do so at least 2 weeks in advance and in consultation with the instructor.
- Research your topic by using the web, the library, or whatever will give you a sufficient understanding. You are expected to be able to explain this topic to your peers at a level where they can in turn tell their friends and answer questions they may have. You are not expected to become an expert :-)
- Prepare a 15 minute presentation using PowerPoint or equivalent software. Note that in 15 minutes you will not have time for many slides. One week before your presentation date, submit a draft to the instructor and get feedback. Finalize your slides.
- On the selected date, give your presentation.
- Both the instructor and your peers will give you feedback on your presentation.
How are presentations evaluated?
We will be using a
rubric to evaluate each presentation. The rubric will be filled by both the instructor and the students in the audience and will be used to give feedback.
- For presenters:
Presentations account for 30% of the grade in the class, so it is very important to prepare them very well.
- For the audience:
The quality of the feedback will contribute to the 15% participation portion of the grade.
As the semester progresses, presentations are expected to be better and better.
Example presentation topics
The following are some examples of presentation topics. You are encouraged to propose others!
People
- Gottfried Leibnitz
- Gottlob Frege
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- David Hilbert
- Henri Pointcaré
- John von Neumann
- Alan Turing
- ...
|
Logic
- Modal logic
- Hoare logic
- Epistemic logic
- Hilbert's program
- ...
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Others
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The following topics were presented in past editions of the course. It is unlikely that the instructor will let you use them as presentation topics.
People
- George Boole
- Georg Cantor
- Kurt Gödel
- Christos Papadimitriou
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Logic
- Non-monotonic logics
- History of logic
- Theorem proving
- Temporal logic
- Fuzzy logic
- Paradoxes
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Others
- Hilbert's 23 problems
- Mathematics in the 19th Century
- Non-euclidean geometries
- Illuminism and Positivism
- Dadaism
- Set theory
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