For ease, I re-list here all the presentations we had throughout the term. I also include some of them. If you gave a presentation and would like your notes to be included, please email them to me and I’ll add them here.
- Jeremy Elison, Wednesday, October 12: Georg Cantor and infinity.
- Kevin Byrne, Wednesday, October 26: Alan Turing and Turing machines.
- Keith Ward, Monday, November 7: Grigori Perelman and the Poincaré conjecture.
- David Miller, Wednesday, November 16: Augustin Cauchy and Cauchy’s dispersion equation.
- Taylor Mitchell, Friday, November 18: Lajos Pósa and Hamiltonian circuits.
- Sheryl Tremble, Monday, November 28: Pythagoras and the Pythagorean theorem.
- Blake Dietz, Wednesday, November 30:
and the Happy End problem.
Here are Jeremy’s notes on his presentation. Here is the Wikipedia page on Cantor, and a link to Cantor’s Attic, a wiki-style page discussing the different (set theoretic) notions of infinity.
Here are a link to the official page for the Alan Turing year, and the Wikipedia page on Turing. If you have heard of Conway’s Game of Life, you may enjoy the following video showing how to simulate a Turing machine within the Game of Life; the Droste effect it refers to is best explained in by H. Lenstra in a talk given at Princeton on April 3, 2007, and available here.
Here is a link to the Wikipedia page on Perelman, and the Clay Institute’s description of the Poincaré conjecture. In 2006, The New Yorker published an interesting article on the unfortunate “controversy” on the priority of Perelman’s proof.
Here are David’s slides on his presentation, and the Wikipedia page on Cauchy.
Here is a link to Ross Honsberger’s article on Pósa (including the result on Hamiltonian circuits that Taylor showed during her presentation).
Here are Sheryl’s slides on Pythagoras and his theorem. In case the gif file does not play, here is a separate copy:
The Pythagorean theorem has many proofs, even one discovered by President Garfield!
Finally, here is the Wikipedia page on 
A kind of library 