Idea Journal Guidelines

As a means for creatively engaging with the course material, you'll be expected to make regular posts to the forum section of the course Wiki to record number theoretic ideas or conjectures which you formulate. Acceptable posts include anything which is relevant to the course material being discussed. This could mean that you're taking a known theorem and asking for a generalization in a particular direction or that you're posting a link to some other webpage which covers some interesting idea connected to the work we've done.

For instance, after reading Goldbach's conjecture

Goldbach's conjecture: Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two (not necessarily distinct) prime numbers.

You might wonder: who is this guy Goldbach? This might lead you to Googling the name and reporting back a few interesting details. Alternatively, you might read Goldbach's conjecture and wonder: why is this limited to even numbers? This might lead you to trying to come up with a reasonable restatement of Goldbach's conjecture that includes odd numbers, or perhaps you'll give an explanation for why such a restatement will never be reasonable. Remember: the point is to creatively engage with the course material. Also remember that whenever you post, you should write clearly and give other class members a reasonable context to understand your post.

Your grade for the idea journal will be based on the frequency, content and quality of your posts. It should not be challenging for each student create one post in each chapter, nor should it be overly burdensome for each student to respond to one or two other posts per chapter. This basic level of participation will give you 75 of the possible 100 points on the journal.

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