2008-04-05 19:11MATH 880 PROSEMINAR JT SMITHOUTLINE 27 SPRING 20081. Assignmenta. Are there further questions about the social organization of mathematics?b. I have selected some papers for us to critique: a term paper written at anothercollege in 1982, by a senior whose native language was not English, for acapstone course in the mathematics major. It is online, with the link “BeesTerm Paper”. Below is my critique of its first paragraph. You should be ableto criticize the remainder of it similarly. I asked someone to lead a discussionof similar editing of two more paragraphs.c. I posted two other term papers for similar treatment. Please note: these aregood papers that need polish.2. Here is a possible copyediting critique of its title and first paragraph.a. Title. No quotes, please.i. Rephrase to avoid the doubly-hyphenated word.ii. A more succinct title might be How the bees do it. But that might causesnickers, so better rephrase. (Actually the reference is to a 1940s ColePorter song, “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Let’s doit, let’s fall in love.”) b. It is interesting... Omit “It is interesting to note that”.c. With the help...i. an electron microscopeii. one can findiii. icosahedraliv. virusesv. a regular polyhedronvi. in a radiolariumvii. Insert a comma after radiolarium.d. One may also...i. Since viruses was plural so should be honeycombs. Thus hexagons shouldbe, too. The one can find and one may also find parallelism is distract-ing, so I’d write in place of this sentence, Bees’ honeycombs also displayhexagonal symmetry.e. The honeycomb of...i. Omit of the bees.ii. consistsiii. Omit bee-.iv. Insert a comma after cells.v. I wonder if the cells are similar enough to prisms to be called prismatic.vi. vesselsf. The openings of...i. Use bases not bottoms; the latter invites derision.ii. rhombiPage 2 MATH 880 SPRING 2008 OUTLINE 272008-04-05 19:11g. The ancient Greek ...i. Close up the whitespace after the double quote.ii. Replace “, most excellent Megathon,” with an ellipsis. It’s not relevantand you wouldn’t want to be required to explain it.iii. amongh. Pappus goes oni. Pappus concludedii. honeycombs3. We digressed about preparation of graphics for papers.a. Several years ago I started writing a book, tentatively titled Mathematics andMathematica. I worked out its chapter 11, on two-dimensional graphics. It’son the web, in nearly publishable form. There’s a link on this course’s homepage. You need to use the password m&m (lowercase, no spaces). There you’llfind *.pdf files for its dozen or so subsections, and some Mathematicanotebook files.b. Some of the notebook files require an add-on package called twoDG. You’llfind in this material instructions on installing it if you wish. In fact, you’llfind instruction about how to assemble your own ensemble of Mathematicafunctions into an add-on package just like the commercial ones.c. Warning: Mathematica has changed versions since this package was built.It’s first execution generates a lot of error message about colors. But it worksfor graphics that don’t use color. I haven’t updated its color facilities yet.d. This chapter demonstrates virtually all of the built-in Mathematica 2D graph-ics features that were available when I wrote it. Those demonstration pro-grams do not use my twoDG package. So you can get an idea of what’s possi-ble by browsing through the text files; they’re amply illustrated.e. I’ve been using twoDG this week to produce some geometry diagrams for ashort paper I’m writing on definitions and nondefinability. That’s online also,with a link on this course’s home page, so you can see what I was talkingabout. This kind of diagram is the package’s intended purpose. For example,I spent a great deal of time designing its functions that produce tick marks,so that I can now draw diagrams like this almost freehand, without stoppingto figure out details like those.f. That is not a chore for amateurs, by the way. There is quite a lore about howto design such functions to make them easy to use. Unfortunately, Mathemat-ica is by no means the ideal programming language for that sort of thing, butit’s what we use at SFSU.4. That paper and most of the chapter 11 files requireda. design of figures (generally brainstorming with pencil and scratch paper),b. implementation with Mathematica, checking the results onscreen against thedesign,c. exporting Mathematica’s graphics output to a file,d. designing the figure placement and labels in the word-processor context withempty graphics boxes,MATH 880 SPRING 2008 OUTLINE 27 Page 32008-04-05 19:11e. importing the graphics file into the word processor,f. moving labels into the correct position with the word processor.5. Choosing the appropriate file format is a trial-and-error process. For this produc-tion scheme, I know that *.eps files work: Mathematica exports them, Word-Perfect imports them, and the results look good enough to publish.6. Someone noted that that my circles looked jaggy on the projected display. But ifyou print the *.pdf file at 85% reduction, which is how Marchisotto & Smith 2007was done, they look just fine. If I needed smoother curves for large-scale projection,or for some other scenario, I’d go into trial-an-error mode. I doubt that I’d be ableeven to get professional help.7. One very important strategy that is evident from the above discussion is this: Don’task Mathematica to make your figure labels!a. While it does have features for matching your text fonts and placing labelsprecisely, Mathematica is much harder to control than a good word processor,and you’ll be frustrated by ugly results.b. The secret is to import Mathematica’s exported graphics output file into agraphics box that lies under the text in the word processor. I set the wordprocessor to position that box as though it were a giant character, and to makeit transparent, so that I can enter new characters for labels right on top of it.I can control their microspacing visually with ease and great precision. Andobviously, I can match my text character