The term paper represent one third of the grade. The paper, which should be on a topic related in some way to the course, can have several formats.
One is the following: Imagine that you were to give a 90-minute lecture to the class on your selected topic. The topic paper could be a lucid and well organized set of notes on what you would say. The material for these lectures could be looked up in appropriate references.
Another format for the paper is to write a program to do something related to the course. If you choose to do this you should explain what you are doing, give an overview including any comments on certain difficult points and present clear and well-documented code. If you choose this option you should learn a particular programming language.
If you have a better idea for a term paper (for instance, if you think that one of the chapters in the lecture notes does a bad job of explaining things, and that you could do a better job!), then you may pursue it.
The topic for the paper should be selected by midterm. You should try to have a topic chosen and a plan of action by Session 23. Students often choose to use the paper to fulfill the MIT writing requirement.
Paper Topics
The basic idea is that you should take some topic preferably one not covered in the course, and imagine that you were to give a lecture on it, which would convey to someone of reasonable intelligence but no particular knowledge of the field, what the subject was about and at least one interesting and non trivial result in it. For those of you who are juniors or above this can be your phase 2 paper though you may have to work on it some so that others can take a seminar somehow in perfecting it. Among possible topics are:
- Hashing
- Matching Theory
- Other Error Correcting Coding Schemes
- The New Primality Testing Algorithm
- Novel Linear Programming Algorithms
- New Ideas on Linear Programming and Complexity
- New Linear Programming Algorithms
List of Topics Chosen Last Year
- Beating the House at Blackjack
- Big Integer Math
- Black Scholes Model
- Black Scholes Model Calculation
- Catalan Numbers - an Introduction
- Chaos and Fractals
- Combinatorial Optimization
- The TSP Comparisons Containing a Biological Attack
- Domino Tilings of Theaztec Diamond
- Economic Game Theory and Auctions
- Efficient Algorithm for Archtypical Gradebased Scoring
- Electronic Voting
- Elementary Fractal Geometry
- Enigma Breaking Environmental Accounting
- Evolution of the Four Color Theorem
- Information among Peers
- Introduction to Game Theory and Various Applications
- jpeg Compression
- Marriage Problem
- Mathematics of Solving a Rubik's Cube Blindfolded
- Modern Cryptography
- Morse Code vs. Huffman Coding
- Optimal Solutions to the Stable Marriage Problem
- Probability and its Importance in Gambling
- Support Vector Machine
- Survey of Graphs and Coloring
- Survey of the Jacobsthal Numbers
- The Boosting Algorithm and Game Theory
- The Five Color Theorem
- Topics in the Theory of Computation
- Variations in the Gamblers Ruin Problem
- Wavelet Analysis