2008-02-21 13:29MATH 880 PROSEMINAR JT SMITHOUTLINE 12 SPRING 20081. Assignmenta. Continue formulating questions about the paper we’re outlining in class.i. Where should examples go?ii. What about history?b. Continue formulating questions about the social organization of mathematics.2. Ms Afaga presented some features of the developing outline of her thesis. Theensuing discussion centered on these questions.a. How much background should she be presenting, given that her paper is athesis, not an expository paper?b. Should there be a brief introductory paragraph up front, possibly to be para-phrased later in the problem statement after the background discussion in theintroduction?c. Students requested elucidation of some definitions, particularly that of theinfinite-dimensional general linear group, and the mappings from that groupto and from the automorphism group of the formal power series ring.d. I suggested that she concentrate on refining the outline, postponing prosecomposition probably longer than she might wish. It is much easier to reorga-nize a developing outline than to shuffle prose whose major sentences havealready been connected together.We’ll continue these discussions with Ms Afaga as she works further on the outline.3. We discussed some ongoing correspondence between me and Birkhäuser regardinguse of LaTeX in book production.4. We also discussed an item in the current MAA online newsletter regarding mathe-matical plagiarism: