1. Chuck Doran will talk about "Elliptic Modular Surfaces"
   on Friday while I'm in Berkeley / San Francisco.

2. There is a new chapter called "Solutions" that I'm adding as I
   grade each homework assignment.  You can look at it by downloading
   the complete course textbook from the 583 website.

3. I will give two lectures on Dirichlet characters instead of one,
   since there are many interesting basic things you will greatly    
   enjoy learning here. 

4. Projects: It is time to start thinking about choosing a project.
   
Some ideas (you could do something else, though):
 
  []  Prove that Maeda's conjecture implies that for any weight k
      there are is a positive density of primes p such that the Hecke
      operator T_p on S_k(SL_2(Z)) has irreducible characteristc
      polynomial.  (This seems to be an open problem. I have some
      ideas that I've discussed with Koopa...)   I would be helpful
      on this (we could meet regularly).

  []  Explain what topological modular forms are.   Say something
      about what some of the computational challenges are related
      to them.

  []  State Serre's conjecture precisely.  Give some examples. 
      Say something (without proofs) about amazing recent progress
      (i.e., it is almost proved). 

  []  Describe some connections between counting partitions of
      integers and modular forms.  Possibly implement something
      relevant to either partitions or this connection, which could be
      included in SAGE.

  []  Implement something in SAGE (we could meet regularly to
      discuss this).