Your weekly homework assignments will be taken from Mathematica notebooks that are available on this website.

To read the files, you will either need a copy of Mathematica (provided on lab workstations) or a copy of the MathReader program, which is available for free from the Mathematica web site .

Downloading the files  should be as easy as pie. No, really.

Simply click on the mathematica file you want . The file you want will then either download automatically (depending on your browser settings) or will appear in the right hand frame as a wierd looking text file filled with bizzare incomprehensible commands.

NO, that's not your actual assignment! Once this file is translated by Mathematica it'll look much less bizarre and incomprehensible. I hope.

There are various ways to download the file. One simple way is to select all of the text in the file , using the Select All command in the Edit menu. Then copy the text, and paste it into a fresh Mathematica notebook. Mathematica will prompt you with a question: do you want the program to interpret the text as a notebook? (answer: yes!). The notebook should appear magically before your eyes, with all formatting intact.

A second way to download is to click anywhere in that  right hand frame to make it active, and choose Save File from the browser menu. In some versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer, this command is called Save Frame or just Save As. Whatever. In any case, this should create a file called ProblemFile1.nb on your computer.

OK, if this still doesn't work, it may be that your browser isn't allowing you to save the file in the right hand frame. SO to get around this,click anywhere in the frame, but hold down the mouse. You will get an option that allows you to open the frame in a new window. If you do that, you should be able to save the file in the new window. Whew! OK, so it may not be easy as pie.
Voila! Open this file from within Mathematica, and you are done.

(You Web surfing pros out there already know that there are trickier ways of doing this download, like adding the file type .nb to your preferences as a Mathematica document. The MIME type for these files is application/mathematica, and the suffix is nb. )