Fall 2019 MATH 202A 001 LEC

Prerequisites:  Math 104 and considerable experience with other upper-division mathematics courses and with writing proofs. Math 105, 110, 142 and 185 give especially useful preparation. I have no restrictions on enrollment by undergraduates. See Math department staff advisors for any needed enrollment codes.

Description: This course, and Math 202B, are "tool courses", in that they cover some basic mathematical concepts that are of importance in virtually all areas of mathematics and its applications. In Math 202A these include: Metric spaces and general topological spaces, compactness, theorems of Tychonoff, Urysohn, Tietze, locally compact spaces; an introduction to general measure spaces and integration of functions on them, with Lebesgue measure on the real line as a key example; Banach spaces of functions, and the very beginnings of functional analysis. In Math 202B most of these topics will be developed further, especially measure and integration, and functional analysis.

Office: 811 Evans

Office Hours: TBA

Recommended Texts (available free on line for UCB students): See course web page.  

Course Webpage: https://math.berkeley.edu/~rieffel/202AannF19.html 

Grading: Letter grade. There will be a final examination, on ??  Wednesday, December18, from 8 to 11 am  ??, which will count for 35% of the course grade. There will be a midterm examination (whose date will be decided very early in the semester), at the regular class time, which will count for 15% of the course grade. There will be no early or make-up final examination. Nor will a make-up midterm exam be given; instead, if you tell me ahead of time that you must miss the midterm exam, then the final exam will count for 50% of your course grade. If you miss the midterm exam but do not tell me ahead of time, then you will need to bring me a persuasive doctor's note or equivalent in order to try to avoid a score of 0.

Homework:  I plan to assign roughly-weekly problem sets. Collectively they will count for 50% of the course grade. Students are strongly encouraged to discuss the problem sets and the course content with each other, but each student should write up their own solutions, reflecting their own understanding, to turn in. Even more, if students collaborate in working out solutions, or get specific help from others, they should explicitly acknowledge this help in the written work they turn in. This is general scholarly best practice. There is no penalty for acknowledging such collaboration or help.

Comment: Students who need special accomodation for examinations should bring me the appropriate paperwork, and must tell me at least a week in advance of each exam what accomodation they need for that exam, so that I will have enough time to arrange it.

Using TEX: I encourage students to write up their problem-set solutions in TEX, more specifically LATEX. This is a powerful mathematical typesetting program which is widely used in the sciences, engineering, etc., for documents that use a lot of mathematical symbolism. Thus learning to use TEX is a valuable skill if you work in such fields. For more information about this see the course web page.

Comment: The above procedures are subject to change.