Learning about Topology SummaryMonday - Friday, July 4 - 8, 2011Our Working Group is attending the topology course offered as part of the Undergraduate Faculty Program. This is an unusual course in that subject of the course (organized by Erica Flapan) is the development of a topology course at a level appropriate for a college freshman. So the course is being developed in real time by the participants in the UFP. Our group attends the course and then has an hour to debrief and do problems. We spend some of the hour giving feedback about the course, so our group is contributing to the UFP program as well as learning from it. This week, the topics for the days were (1) examples of topological surfaces, including tic tac toe on the torus (2) the hypercube (3) some terminology concerning geometry and topology and (4) orientation, including the Klein bottle. Most of the remaining time was spent discussing to clarify various conceptual points raised in the lectures. Next week we propose to do more problems and some of us will work on high school materials. |