Jump to the semester study guide , the Calendar and to class notes. Here is some miscellaneous advice culled from previous editions of the course. Here are some ideas for the projects. Here are some interesting DPGraph scripts.
Professor George Francis
11:00 am MWF
341 Altgeld Hall
contact: gfrancis@uiuc.edu, 344 Illini Hall, 333-4794
Text: Ph.Tondeur, Vectors and Transformations, Publish or Perish, 1993.
Notes: G.Francis, Pictures in Perspective, Chapter 3 of A Topological Picturebook, Springer, 1987.
This lecture/project course treats these five themes of traditional
interest in classical Euclidean geometry from a contemporary vectorial
viewpoint, in 3-space as well as in the traditional plane.
1. The Origins of Greek Geometry (student research).
2. Renaissance Perspective and 3-dimensional Drawing (class notes).
3. The Industrial Origins of Cartesian Geometry (class text).
4. Klein's Erlangen Program to Classify Euclidean Isometries (class text).
5. Engineering Drawing from Descriptive Geometry to Computer Graphics (computer lab).
Students will be asked to complete five documentation projects, one in each of the five themes. A project may take the form of an oral report, a research essay, a web document, a lesson using geometry software, a JAVA applet, a physical model, a graphic or animation, a VR experiment. The form and content of a proposed project is open to negotiation, and adapted to the interest and skill of the student. The projects are non-competitive; timely completion as "contracted" earns full credit. There will be a written midterm and final based on the text, notes and labs. The homework, lab reports and projects comprise 50% of the grade. The open-journal final is 30%. There will be one or two hourlies.