Excursions in Mathematics

Fall, 2004

(formerly called Mathematics for the Liberal Arts)

Instructor: Dr. Adler (adler at uakron dot edu)

Time and Place: MWF, 1:10-2:00 pm. Polsky Hall 488.

Course Handouts: A few of these (indicated below) are in pdf format. You can read them with tools like Acrobat Reader.

• Administrivia: General course policies
• Tentative schedule, with homework assignments
• Term papers: here are the rules. You may write on any topic suggested by a project in the textbook, or you may write on any of a supplementary list of suggested topics (in pdf format).
• Review sheets for the midterm tests are available here. (These are in pdf format. Usually, a few students have difficulty printing these out. For this and other reasons, don't wait until the last minute.)
  • Review for Test 1
  • Review for Test 2
  • Review for Test 3
  • Review for the first half of Test 4 (I haven't yet prepared a review sheet for the second half).
  • Review for Test 5
  • Answers for the review sheets
• Why you should start saving for retirement now (pdf). (This is related to Chapter 10.)
• In response to a request made in class, here is a list of all sequential coalitions (pdf) in a weighted voting system involving four players.

Textbooks:

• Tannenbaum, Excursions in Modern Mathematics, 5th edition, Prentice-Hall, 2004.
• Huff, How to Lie With Statistics, W. W. Norton, 1954 (reissued 1993).

Some sources for news and research topics:

• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• The Akron Beacon Journal
• Slashdot
• New Scientist
• The Onion
• CNN, BBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNET... and many, many more.