Introducing Curves

These notes supplement the lectures and provide practise exercises. We begin with some material you will have met before, perhaps in other forms, to set some terminology and notation. Further details on unfamiliar topics may be found in, for example Cohn [3] for algebra, Dodson and Poston [5] for linear algebra, topology and differential geometry, Gray [6] for curves, surfaces and calculations using the computer algebra packageMathematica, and Wolfram [10] forMathematica itself. Several on-line hypertext documents are available to support this course [1].