Student-evaluation sneak preview : I am friendly and extremely helpful but have a somewhat chaotic teaching style and am way too ambitious as regards content… I was about to deny vehemently all assertions (except for the chaotic bit) but may have to change my mind after reading this report on Mark Rowan’s book ‘Symmetry and the monster’ (see also my post )
Oxford University Press considers this book “a must-read for all fans of popular science”. In his blog, Lieven le Bruyn, professor of algebra and geometry at the University of Antwerp, suggests that “Mark Ronan has written a beautiful book intended for the general public”. However, he goes on to say: “this year I’ve tried to explain to an exceptionally good second year of undergraduates, but failed miserably Perhaps I’ll give it another (downkeyed) try using Symmetry and the Monster as reading material”. As an erstwhile mathematician, I found the book more suited to exceptional maths undergraduates than to the general public and would strongly encourage authors and/or publishers to pass such works before a few fans of popular science before going to press. Peggie Rimmer, Satigny.
Well, this ‘exceptionally good year’ has moved on and I had to teach a course ‘Elementary Algebraic Geometry’ to them last semester. I had the crazy idea to approach this in a historical perspective : first I did the Hilbert-Noether period (translating geometry to ideal theory of polynomial rings), then the Krull-Weil-Zariski period (defining everything in terms of coordinate rings) to finish off with the Serre-Grothendieck period (introducing scheme theory)… Not surprisingly, I lost everyone after 1920. Once again there were complaints that I was expecting way too much from them etc. etc. and I was about to apologize and promise I’ll stick to a doable course next year (something along the lines of Miles Reid’s ‘Undergraduate Algebraic Geometry’) when one of the students (admittedly, probably the best of this ‘exceptional year’) decided to do all exercises of the first two chapters of Fulton’s ‘Algebraic Curves’ to become more accustomed to the subject. Afterwards he told me “You know, I wouldn’t change the course too much, now that I did all these exercises I realize that your course notes are not that bad after all…”. Yeah, thanks!
geometry, Grothendieck, monster, symmetry, teaching
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Posted in rants
Written on Tue, 30 January 2007 at 8:38 pm
Tags: geometry, Grothendieck, monster, symmetry, teaching
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