The Idea

I am including optional extra-credit projects, which can only raise your grade. They are truly intended to be optional. The idea is that you might do one of these, in order to pursue something of special interest to you. I am expecting most people will not do these projects, but I want to provide you an opportunity to do something in greater depth related to the course.

This is not intended to make up for doing poorly on exams. Your first responsibility is to learn the main course material. I do not want these projects to interfere with studying for final exams. Thus there is a hard deadline for submitting completed projects: Wednesday, August 15.

Here are the projects I am suggesting:

1. The first possible extra-credit project is a general study of risk and uncertainty, focusing on the historical development. The specific extra-credit project is to read the book:

   Against the Gods, The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein, Wiley, 1996.

   The book was ordered by the bookstore for previous courses, and was on the shelf there this spring, so there should be used copies around. The project is to read this book and write a short paper about it (e.g., 3-5 pages). In order to "individualize" the paper assignment, I am asking you to write a short paper about one or more person (see Name Index at the back of the book) or subject (see Subject Index at the back of the book) that begins with the same letter as your own last name. The idea is to relate the person or subject to the themes of the book in an interesting way. That leaves considerable room for creativity.

2. The second possible extra-credit project is numerical transform inversion.

   The specific extra-credit project is to read about numerical transform inversion, create your own code to numerically invert a Laplace transform, and apply it to do some examples. A list of papers is given on the Computational Tools Web Page. It is not necessary to read much to do this. You can learn a lot with relatively little work. In particular, you only need a few pages in the first listed 1995 paper.

   Here is a specific assignment: Extra-Credit Numerical Homework. Here are some supporting explanatory notes; you might regard them as a guide to reading the 1995 paper. Pseudocode for what you need to do is on the left side of page 41 of that paper. If you really get the bug, you could go onto consider generating functions and/or multi-dimensional transforms. You should turn in your code and the answers to these questions.