MA 337: Computer Assisted Topology and Geometry

January 2020

The goal of this course is to build software to use computers to address various questions in Topology and Geometry, with an emphasis on arriving at rigorous proofs. The course will consist primarily of projects which will be contributions to open source software written in the scala programming language. We assume good programming skills, ideally in a typed functional language such as Scala, Haskell or Idris as well as some mathematical maturity and willingness to work independently. You will also have to become familiar with the git version control system.

In this semester (January 2020) the course will focus on the Topology and Geometry of surfaces, with code aggregated in the repository https://github.com/siddhartha-gadgil/Superficial. Suggested contributions are issues in that repository labelled feature-request. You are free to suggest and implement your own contribution, though it is best if you add an issue and label it feature-request first so it can be discussed. If you plan to work on an issue, please make a comment to avoid duplication of work.

Registering for the course

To register for the course, in addition to registering in the IISc system, you need to carry out some steps which will be explained in the first meeting. In case you are familiar with git and markdown, these are

  1. have/create an account in github,

  2. fork the repository https://github.com/siddhartha-gadgil/Superficial,

  3. send a pull request to add a file in the contributions folder on this repository whose name is your name in camelCase with extension md, for example SiddharthaGadgil.md and whose contents are in the same format as the example below (note: there should be no blank line at the top).

    ---
    author: "Siddhartha Gadgil"
    github-id: "siddhartha-gadgil"
    ---
    

Course Details

Midterm I & II and final Grades

Grades will based entirely on contributions to the repository Superficial. The grades will be given in three groups, based on contributions before a fixed time. The deadline for the first midterm grade, worth 30% of the total, is 6:00 am on March 2, 2020. For all grades the following procedure is followed.

  1. A version is tagged soon after pull requests before the deadline are merged. Grades are based on this.
  2. Only pull requests that pass all tests will be merged.
  3. Please update your report with a brief account of what you have implemented.

The deadline for the second midterm, worth 20% of the total score, is 6:00 am on June 14, 2020. Note that this is one day before the revised date for dropping courses without mention in transcript, as per the revised schedule.

The deadline for the final submission is 6:00 a.m. on June 20, 2020. This is the first day of the final examination in the revised schedule.

Note: The schedule of classes in IISc is likely to be revised again, however the above dates will not be revised.

Timings and Venues

The official timings are for now Monday-Wednesday-Friday, 12:10 - 1:00 pm in LH-3. As this is a 1:3 credit course, we will meet an average of 1 hour a week. Initially we will meet more often. The first meeting will be in LH-3 on Monday, January 13, 2020.

Subsequent meetings will be co-ordinated through the outlook e-mail group CATG2020 at IISc.