Homework Rules and Assignments
MAA 4211 — Advanced Calculus I
Section 1216 (26002), Fall 2021

Homework Rules

• Academic honesty

  On all work submitted for credit by students at the University of Florida, the following pledge is implied:
  "On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid in doing this assignment."

  For purposes of preparing your hand-in homework, no aid is authorized that involves anything but (i) your own brain, (ii) your notes from this class or prerequisite classes, (iii) handouts from me, (iv) the current textbook for this class, and (v) when needed for review, the recent textbooks for UF's MAS4105 and MHF3202. (In particular, solution manuals and online sources such as Wikipedia and Mathematics Stack Exchange are excluded. So are materials from other sections of MAA4211.) It's hard for me to make an exhaustive list of permitted sources, so you may always ask me whether I really meant to exclude some particular source.

  Up until I've announced the list of hand-in problems for a given assignment, you're allowed to work with each other (but you are still not permitted to use other sources not listed above, without express prior permission from me). But once a homework problem is designated for hand-in, you are on your own. (You may still ask me for hints or guidance—in office hours, not by email—but I may or may not give any.) Remember that you are supposed to do ALL assigned problems, not just the hand-in problems. It is very unwise to procrastinate, waiting to see which problems I'm going to require you to hand in, before deciding which problems to work on.
      This does not mean that if something piques your interest for deeper study, beyond what's addressed in class or homework, you're forbidden to pursue that interest by reading (say) a Wikipedia article. The point is that you can't use outside sources to help you do better on your graded work.

  Any infringement of the spirit, not just the letter, of these restrictions, will be considered a violation of the Student Honor Code, and will result in your receiving a failing grade for the course.

• Submission Rules

  The rules below are those for physically submitted homework, which is the submission-mode I'm expecting as of the start of the semester. If I decide to allow electronic submission (in which case all students will be required to submit a given assignment or exam the same way), almost all of the rules below will still apply, but there are additional rules that I'll add.

  Homework will be collected at the beginning of the class period on the announced hand-in day, and must be completed and stapled together before that.

  Even when homework is well written, reading and grading it is very time-consuming and physically difficult for your instructor. In order that this process not be more burdensome than it intrinsically needs to be:

  • Use plain, white, unlined, printer paper with no holes. You can buy a pack of 500 sheets for $7.00 or so, and it will be more than enough for the whole semester (probably the whole year). Do not use any other type of paper (e.g. notebook paper or looseleaf paper).

  • Staple your sheets together in the upper left-hand corner. Any other means of attachment makes more work for me. The staple should be close enough to the corner that when I turn pages, nothing that you've written is obscured. (If you have trouble stapling this way, you haven't left wide enough margins at the left side and/or top of the page, and should rewrite your homework.)

  • The homework you hand in must be neat, and must either be typed or written in pen or DARK pencil. Anything that is difficult for me to read will be returned to you ungraded. I encourage, but do not require, you to typeset your homework in LaTeX; see below.
        Do not turn in homework that is messy, has faint writing, or has anything that's been erased and written over (or written over without erasing). "Written over without erasing" includes not just superimposing a new letter on an old one, but writing something in pencil and then tracing over it in pen. (The latter practice leads to an eye-straining "double vision" effect. Please don't do it.)
        If you are writing on both sides of a sheet of paper, do not use paper/ink/pencil combinations for which the writing on one side of the paper shows on the other side.

  • Work everything out for yourself on scrap paper first. (Next sentence was updated 9/10/21; "wide margins" was changed to "at least 1.75" margins." Update did not occur until after the first homework assignment was handed in. For that assignment, students are not at fault for not knowing just how wide I had meant by "wide".) Carefully rewrite (or typeset) what you're handing on clean sheets of 8.5" x 11" white paper, leaving at least 1.75" margins (left and right and top and bottom) and enough other space for me to write comments. If you squeeze words in at the bottom, sides, or top of a page, do not expect that work to be graded or to receive any credit, even if I graded such work on an earlier assignment.

    (Added 9/10/21, after HW1 hand-in:) To help you keep acceptable margins in handwritten work without frequently measuring with a ruler, I've created a sample page for you to print and keep next to you when you're writing: p. 6 of the pdf file produced by my LaTeX template.

  • (Added 9/10/21, after HW1 hand-in:) Double-space your writing, so that I can easily make short between-line corrections. (If you're writing by hand, interpret "Double-space your writing" as "Between consecutive lines of your writing, leave vertical space that's at least as large as the height of a line of your writing.")

  • Write in complete, unambiguous, grammatically correct, and correctly punctuated sentences and paragraphs, as you would find in your textbook.
  • In your handed-in homework, you are not permitted to use the following symbols in place of words: \( \forall, \exists, \Longrightarrow, \Longleftarrow,\iff, \vee, \wedge,\) and any symbol for logical negation (e.g. \(\sim\)). (Note: the double-arrows \( \Longrightarrow, \Longleftarrow,\) and \(\iff\) are implication arrows. Single arrows do not represent implication, so you may not use them to substitute for the double-arrow symbols.) (On your exams,, to save time you'll be allowed to use the symbols \(\forall, \exists\), \(\Longrightarrow, \Longleftarrow\), and \(\iff\), but you will be required to use them correctly. The handout Mathematical grammar and correct use of terminology, assigned as reading in Assignment 0, reviews the correct usage of these symbols. Even on exams, you will never be allowed to use the symbols \(\vee, \wedge\), or any symbol for logical negation of a statement.

  • Warn me about partial proofs. If a problem is of the form "Prove this" and you've been unable to produce a complete proof, but want to show me how far you got, tell me at the very start of the problem that your proof is not complete (before you start writing any part of your attempted proof). Do not just start writing a proof, and at some point say "This is as far as I got." Otherwise, when I start reading I will assume that you think you've written a complete and correct proof, and spend too long thinking about, and writing comments on, false statements and approaches or steps that were doomed to go nowhere.

  • If you'd like to use LaTeX to typeset your homework, here is a source-file template that includes some commands that you may or may not already know (depending on how much you've used LaTeX in the past, if at all). Rigid use of this template is not required. If you already have some version of TeX (e.g. MiKTeX, a version commonly used with Windows) installed on your computer, this template file should open automatically when you click on it; otherwise, open it with whatever you use to read a plain-text file. To use LaTeX, you'll need to install some version on your computer. (Legitimate versions of LaTeX, such as MiKTeX, are available for free. While there are some non-free text-editors that some people prefer to the one that comes with MiKTeX, I have never used them, and sites that try to sell you anything connected with LaTeX may be scams.) There is abundant documentation on the internet for how to do this; I don't have any particular website I prefer for this. If you have friends or classmates who've already installed LaTeX on their computers, they are likely to be a better source of information than I on the most convenient way to install, and the quickest way to get up to speed.

  

  Assignments

  • How homework will be scored

  • Assignment 0. Due date: Friday 8/27/21, but try to complete it sooner. There is nothing to hand in, but the assignment is important. It is meant to help you assess whether you are ready for this class and want to take it, and (if you stay in the class) to help you avoid costly mistakes on future work that you do hand in.
        Answers to the proof-writing quiz are posted here.

  • Assignment 1. Due-date: 9/10/21.

  • Assignment 2. Due-date: 10/1/21.

  • Assignment 3. Due-date: 11/3/21.

  • Assignment 4. Due date: 11/19/21.

  • Assignment 5 (not complete yet). See assignment for due-dates.