Homework

MAT 4930 — Differential Geometry I
Section 2E15, Fall 2014

Last updated Mon Dec 1 20:46 EDT 2014

Even when homework is well-written, reading and grading it is very time-consuming and physically difficult for your instructor. In order that this process note be more burdensome than it intrinsically needs to be:

  • The homework you hand in must be neat, and must either be typed or written in pen (not pencil!). Please do not turn in homework that is messy or that has anything that’s been erased and written over (or written over without erasing), making it harder to read. If you are writing on both sides of a sheet of paper, do not use paper/ink combinations for which the ink bleeds through from one side of the paper to the other. Anything that is difficult for me to read will be returned to you ungraded.
  • Please leave enough space for me to write comments.
  • Staple the sheets together in the upper left-hand corner. Any other means of attachment makes more work for me. The staple should be close enough to the corner that when I turn pages, nothing that you’ve written is obscured. (If you have trouble stapling this way, you haven’t left wide enough margins at the left side and/or top of the page, and should rewrite your homework.) Also, don’t use paper that’s been ripped out of a spiral-bound notebook; it will make a mess on my floor.
  • Write in complete, unambiguous, grammatically correct, and correctly punctuated sentences, just as you would find in (most) math textbooks.
  • Warn me about partial proofs. If a problem is of the form “Prove this” and you’ve been unable to produce a complete proof, but want to show me how far you got, tell me at the very start of the problem that your proof is not complete (before you start writing any part of your attempted proof). Do not just start writing a proof, and at some point say “This is as far as I got.” Otherwise, when I start reading I will assume that you think you’ve written a complete and correct proof, and spend too long thinking about, and writing comments on, false statements and approaches or steps that were doomed to go nowhere.

Academic honesty. On all work submitted for credit by students at the University of Florida, the following pledge is implied:

    “On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid in doing this assignment.”

You should first try all the problems yourself (alone). After attempting the problems, you may brainstorm with other students in the class for general ideas, but you may not completely work out problems together.

For purposes of preparing your hand-in homework, no aid that involves anything but your own brain, your textbook, your notes, and any handouts from me, is authorized. The “no aid” restriction doesn’t apply until I have announced the hand-in date for a given problem. Up until that announcement, you’re allowed to work with each other, look at other textbooks, ask me for help, etc.

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