Intended audience and usage
We have designed this lab so that it should be approachable for
a student who has taken linear algebra and multivariable calculus,
and not necessarily the most theoretical version of those courses.
We also hope that the lab would be appropriate for use in conjunction
with a course in computational algebraic geometry and commutative
algebra, perhaps based on the Cox, Little, and O' Shea text.
The students could try some of the lab early on to get a feeling for
what the course is about, and then come back to it later after
learning the material in Chapter 3 of that book.
For the instructor, we have included numbered questions throughout
the lab which one might ask the students to turn
in as part of a lab report. There
are also some unnumbered "Questions to think about" in the side
topic pages, which one could ask the students to hand in if one
wanted a longer lab.
A note about MPEG files
At various points in the lab, the user is given the option of
clicking on a link to some MPEG movie showing the graph of a
curve or surface rotating in space. Since downloading these MPEG files
may take some time, certain users may want to avoid clicking on these
links. For this reason, we have tried to provide information on the size
of the file to aid in this decision.
Previous:
Introduction
Vic Reiner <reiner@math.\umn.edu>
Frederick J. Wicklin <fjw@geom.umn.edu>
Last modified: Sun Apr 14 17:14:21 1996