Guidelines for Senior Thesis: Format and Deliverables

The thesis should be prepared in LaTeX using the departmental thesis class available from the senior-thesis website.

The purposes of this requirement are to promote clear presentation, to encourage the student to learn LaTeX, and to facilitate the electronic archiving of senior theses. The LaTeX classes for senior thesis and template files define a cover page, table of contents, summary, and bibliography. In particular,

The cover page shows the title, name of student, name of advisor, name of the second reader, year, and signatures of the student's committee.
The summary should be one to two pages in length, and written in non-technical language. It should be written for an intended audience of non–math-major HMC seniors, without assuming any specific knowledge of the area of the thesis work.
The bibliography should be carefully compiled, giving accurate references for all works cited in the thesis. (Note: It is possible to download citations from MathSciNet in the BibTeX format used by LaTeX, AMSTeX, and AMSLaTeX.)
Any diagrams or plots in the thesis should be prepared electronically, with programs such as xfig, xmgr, Grace, Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, Adobe Illustrator, or TeX itself. Hand-drawn diagrams are discouraged. They are only acceptable when the student's thesis advisor has given explicit permission, and in those cases they must be clearly and carefully drawn.
Frequent use of a spellchecker is recommended. For instance, the UNIX command ispell filename.tex will apply a spellchecker to a TeX source file called filename.tex.

Deliverables

Finally, upon completion it is the student's responsibility to deliver to the thesis coordinator

Six (6) printed copies of the signature page (signed by both your thesis advisor and second reader)
Your signed copyright form
Your completed address form
Two (2) spiral-bound copies of the thesis on Xerox paper, with clear plastic covers.
Two (2) electronic copies of your thesis; consisting of
1. A PDF copy of your typeset thesis
2. The LaTeX source code and all files needed to typeset your thesis—see the archiving page for details of this requirement.

Final copies of your thesis for binding and distribution will be printed by the department during the summer.