Administrative Information

Instructor	Joe Mileti
Office	Noyce 2514
Office Hours	Monday 1:00 - 2:00 Tuesday 10:30 - 12:00 Wednesday 2:00 - 3:00 Friday 11:00 - 12:00 By Appointment
Email	miletijo ~at~ grinnell ~dot~ edu
Phone	269-4994
Class Time	Th 2:15 - 3:05
Classroom	Noyce 2245

Problem Sets

Problem Sets will be posted each week and will consist of 6-8 problems. These problems will be challenging and require creative methods to solve. The goal of the course is to learn how to approach these problems in a manner that leads to insight and hopefully complete solutions. Although finding solutions and writing them well is the ultimate goal, our emphasis during class time is to learn techniques that help to achieve this end.

This is an S/D/F course. To achieve an S, you must satisfy the following:

• Attend at least 10 class meetings.
• Turn in complete written solutions to at least 10 problems. These solutions must be polished and well-written to receive credit. If your solution is incorrect or not complete, I will return it and you can resubmit it once you address the comments.
• Give at least 2 oral presentations of starred problems. During such a presentation, you should describe in detail how you approached the problem and what steps led to any important insights. Describing special cases that you solved, dead ends that you encountered, and errors that you made is very much encouraged. In fact, simply presenting a correct solution with no motivation for your approach is not sufficient. It is not required that you have completely solved the problems that you present, but you should have made some nontrivial progress. If there is a problem that you would like to present, please let me know (in person or by email) so that you can ``claim" it for the next class session.

Consult the general Grinnell College policy on Academic Honesty for general information.

One goal of the course is to prepare students to take the Putnam Exam. Thus, unlike many other math classes were collaboration is encouraged, in this course you should try to solve the problems on your own. You also may not look up solutions to these problem online or in books.

Students with learning, physical, or psychiatric disabilities enrolled in this course that may need disability-related classroom accommodations are encouraged to make an office appointment with me in first few weeks of class. You will need to provide documentation of your disability to the Associate Dean and Director of Academic Advising, Joyce Stern, located on the third floor of the JRC.

If you have a religious observance that conflicts with your participation in the course, please come speak with me as soon as possible to discuss appropriate accommodations.