Reference Materials for Mathematics

Section 2.1 Academing Writing in Mathematics

• Your assignments should be clean, legible and well organized. Don’t hand in work with crossed-out sections or questions out of order.
• Don’t expect to hand in the paper that your start working with. First work out your solutions in rough; then organize your solutions and write up a complete, clear and well-structured good copy to hand in. Like all academic work, good mathematics involves drafts.
• Annotate your calculations and explain your work. A string of calculations without any explanation is usually not sufficient. In the basic idea, I said that an assignment is your argument; arguments require words and sentences, not just mathematical symbols.
• As a starting rule-of-thumb, most first and second year math assignments should be roughly 50% calculations and 50% words and sentences.
• In the writing you do between around your calculations, hold yourself to the same standards you would for any academic writing. Use complete sentences and strive for clear, concise and formal writing.
• For the vast majority of your work, you should leave numerical answers in exact values. (For example, write \(\sqrt{5}\) instead of the approximate value \(2.236\text{.}\))
• When you use a computer algebra system or other technical tool for calculations, briefly indicate that you’ve done so.
• If you use any external sources, you must reference them. This includes online courses, videos, and online discussion boards. I am not particular on what reference formatting you use: use any of the standard formats. (There is more discussion on citing rouses in Chapter 1).
• If you use a resource which introduces definitions or solution techniques that are different from what we use in this course, you need to explain those definitions or techniques and tell me why they apply to the question that I assigned.
• Collaboration on assignments is strongly encouraged. However, you must write up your own version of the assignment after you have worked together to figure out a solution. Assignemnts from different students which have word-for-word identical sentences are not acceptable.
• If you collaborated with other students in the course, please record who you worked with somewhere on the assignment.
• Hand in your assignments when they are due. If a health or emergency situation prevents you from finishing your assignment, let me know (by email, preferably) as early as possible.
• For assignments submitted online, if you are working with pen and paper, submit a PDF scan of your assignment. Almost all mobile devices (phone, tablets) have easy ways to use their built-in cameras to scan documents. (I will post instruction on the course Moodle site as well).