Course Description. This course is a 1-credit seminar course, required for MATH Ph.D. students. MATH Ph.D. students are its primary audience. Students not pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics may take this course with permission of instructor, or by registering for the correct section of CDS 991. However, the requirements of the course are the same for all students enrolled, regardless of the degree they are receiving.

Requirements. The two core requirements for this course are attendence, and a presentation to the class, typically 50 minutes in length.

Attendence. Every class there will be an attendence sheet distributed. I will be recording your attendence. It may happen occasionally that the graduate seminar will be replaced by the Colloquium, in which case the Colloquium will be required. In addition, you are required to attend 5 seminars offered in MATH, CDS, or a related field, at least three of which must be in MATH. Good choices for MATH seminars are the Colloquium, and the Geometry, Algebra, and Combinatorics Seminar. For these, you should submit to me a list of the titles and dates of the seminars that you attended. You don't need to list more than five.

For every two missed seminars or regular meetings of 795, your grade will be brought down one half grade (from an A to an A-, or an A- to a B+, etc. Anything below a C will be marked F). For this reason, it is extremely important that you attend class and also take advantage of the seminars in the department. If you experience an illness, have a religious reason or extreme personal circumstances that by itself makes you miss two or more regular 795 meetings, please speak to me.

The last class is May 1. Turn in your list of attended seminars to me by May 1, 2007.

Presentation. You will give a 50 minute presentation over the semester. In order to prepare for this presentation, you should find a mentor who is a faculty member in the Math Department who will help you prepare a lecture for the other graduate students.

Your presentation will be graded based on these criteria:

• Whether you turned in a formated .pdf file of an abstract, for posting to the webiste, at least three days before your talk.
  
• How well you understand the material you present
• Whether the topic you covered is somewhat independent of material offered in a course, and at a graduate level.
  
• How well you communicate the material you present to your audience
• No computer code allowed! What does this mean? Your talk should NOT consist of throwing computer code on a screen and walking the audience through it. Using code as part of the mathematics that you present is entirely appropriate, as is a presentation discussing results or models that derive from computer code.
  

The presentation will be judged by myself, or another attending faculty member. No student opinions are solicited! Providing you do a decent job, you will earn full credit for the presentation.

Generally speaking, you should have a mentor in place at least two weeks in advance of your lecture, and you should give me an abstract about one week in advance of your lecture. The abstract should be formated and put in a .pdf file, which you should send me electronically.