Math 448 (Expectations)

This course should help you develop a deeper understanding of curves and surfaces in three-space, and will hint at how to extend those ideas to higher dimensions as well.

Why should you care about this? Because these objects appear around you everywhere in real life. They can be found in nature (for example, in the spirals of the Nautilus shell and in the structure of plants and how they grow), in architecture (the shapes of domes, arches, etc), in engineering (bridge design and other suspensions), in life sciences (in the DNA double helix and the folding of proteins), in medical science (3D modeling from CAT scans and MRI data), in physics (the paths of particles and the shapes of electro-magnetic fields), in astronomy (orbital paths), in robotics (motions of robot arms, configuration spaces for robot movements), and even in the entertainment industry (special effects and computer animation).

Our studies should strengthen your geometric intuition about these objects, and should provide you with some tools for handling them more precisely. It should also give you a good start for later courses (perhaps in graduate school) on differential geometry or topology.

See also the course outline for a listing of some of the topics we would like to cover.

Math 448 (Winter 2007) web pages Created: 01 Jan 2007 Last modified: Jan 2, 2007 8:25:24 AM Comments to: dpvc@union.edu

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