In the first part of the semester, you will
write reviews of three mathematical articles. A review
(sometimes called a critical review) of a scholarly
article is a paper that summarizes, analyzes and evaluates the
article. Despite what the word may suggest, a critical review is
not (usually) a criticism of an article, but rather report in
which you summarize an article, explain its purpose, express
your reaction to it, and evaluate how well the article meets its
goals.
In the beginning, you may have three main questions: "How do I find an article?" and "How do I write a review of it?" and "How will it be graded?" This page is intended to answer those questions. |
Everyone will read the same article for the
first review. It is Six Ways to Sum a
Series, by Dan Kalman. It was published in the College
Mathematics Journal in 1993, and won the 1994 George Pólya
Award.
For the remaining reviews, you will choose your own paper to read. Below are links to lists of articles that have been awarded prizes by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). You may write a review of any article on these lists. (You may also report on an article not listed here, but if you wish to do this, please check with me first.) Browse these lists and look for titles that suggest the article may be of interest to you. Then download it. You may want to download several interesting articles in case your first choice does not work out. The library may have copies of the articles for which no electronic full-text is available. |
This award is given to the author of an
outstanding expository article on a mathematical topic by a
member of the MAA.
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Established in 1964, this award recognizes
authors of articles of expository excellence published in The American
Mathematical Monthly or Mathematics Magazine.
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Established in 1976, this award is given to
articles of expository excellence published in Mathematics
Magazine.
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Established in 1976, this award is given to
articles of expository excellence published in the College
Mathematics Journal.
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You can download full text versions of many of
these articles from the Mathematical Association of America's
Digital Library. Here is a link to their Writing
Awards page. If this page does not have a full-text
version of the article you are looking for, try searching for it
on Jstor, a very large
database of journal articles. |
Once you have selected an article that looks interesting, you should follow the following guidelines. | |||||||||||||||||||||
1. |
READ. Obviously, reading your
article is the first step in writing a review. But it is not
always quite so obvious how to read it. Here are some
suggestions.
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2. |
ANALYZE. After reading, ask
yourself the following types of questions.
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3. |
EVALUATE. Formulate your
responses to the following types of questions.
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4. |
WRITE. Now you are ready to
begin writing. There are no definite rules here, but your paper
should meet all the requirements stated below.
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5. |
POLISH. Once you are done with
the main task of writing, you need to put the finishing touches
on your paper. Please consider the following points.
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The following table indicates how your paper
will be graded
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