Current news and notes:

• Our lectures will be held in MA 313 from now on.  This decision was met by the BMS administration since our class size exceeds the recommended seating for the room. I hope we can reproduce the U-shaped seating from 212 in 313 — with your help I think we shouldn’t have any problem adjusting the new roomier quarters.
• Check out this attractive web-site featuring mathematical visualization and education.  It was recently awarded a gold prize in a European competition for internet and mobile apps.  I found quite a few things to like, particularly the interactive Mandelbrot zoomer.
• Assignment4 is ready for download — although I may add something else over the weekend, the first part is ready to work on. The assignment will be due Friday 29.11 at midnite.

Symmetry and groups.  Mr. Gunn introduced the concepts of symmetry, focusing on patterns in the euclidean plane. The set of symmetries of a pattern he showed to form an algebraic structure known as a group. He introduced three categories of symmetry groups in the euclidean plane based on the translational subgroup of the group. … to be continued… Here are some good lecture notes on euclidean symmetries from last year’s course.  Here is an introduction to the Conway notation for groups.

Here is a basic treatment  by Prof. Sullivan of transformation group theory.