Martin's Self Nomination Ok, I want to nominate myself (Martin Ceperley) for this Wylde Q. Chicken award. This was an assignment for geometry sometime last fall. The first chapter was supposed to be completely about parallelograms, explaining them and their properties. The second chapter due a week later I think was to explain the differences between a rhombus, a rectangle, and a square, or something like that, I sort of forget. To tell you the truth, I completely forget what the assignment was for the third chapter. Oh well, it obviously didn't fulfill it whatever it was. The story behind these I think was that I was just really bogged down the week when the first one was due, so one late night I was wondering how on earth I would do a geometry paper due tomorrow, so I had a little creative spur and went completely overboard with word processor goodies. Even though as the weeks progressed, these essays became less and less relevant to the assignment, surprisingly I think Mr. Halperin gave me an A anyway. P.S. The original turned-in chapter was printed on neon-orange paper, because I think that was all I could find that night.

The Parallelogram Story Chapter 1: Parallelograms (page 1 --- page 2) Chapter 2: Reincarnations of the Parallelograms Chapter 3: Confessions Ben Halperin's Endorsement Martin Ceperley turned in what I would categorize as an extremely demented assignment on Parallelograms. In retrospect, I should have given him an A+ instead of an A, which is the grade I did give him. I wholeheartedly second his nomination, and presume that he submitted a copy of the assignment as part of his nomination. (I have kept a copy as well.) First of all, it was very risky of him to turn in the assignment the way that he did, because the rest of the class had turned in more traditional essays. However, all of the math in the assignment was correct and complete. Marty showed that he not only knew what he was talking about, but that he could take some part of mathematics and mold it into something extremely creative and personal. I was so impressed with his paper that I showed it to three mathematics profs and two MathEd profs -- all of them were extremely impressed, too. I understand this award goes to someone who has demonstrated excellence while "coloring outside the lines" -- I think that Marty has done this. You should take a look at some of the stuff he is working on for his next project (on his website)... Ben Halperin