After the recent news of Freddie, Fannie, Bear Sterns, Lehman Bros, Merrill Lynch, and AIG, I got to thinking about how much of my work is online—Google Docs, Gmail, WordPress, Wikidot, etc. If our highly-regulated banking industry can fail, why not these young unregulated internet sites? Should there be an FDIC equivalent for the “banks” that…
Month: September 2008
The nuts and bolts of writing mathematics
This was a handout that I made for my Discrete Mathematics class. At our college this course is the gateway to the mathematics major and is the students’ introduction to writing mathematical arguments. Here is a pdf of the handout. The nuts and bolts of writing mathematics You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly…
Doodle replaces sign-up sheet on the door
Suppose you have to schedule meetings with all of your first-year advisees. The old-school way to do this is to tape a piece of paper to your door with all of your free times listed. The students come by and sign up for their desired slot. This works pretty well, but the downside is that…
Advice for new faculty
Mathematics under the Microscope recently posted the text of Gian-Carlo Rota‘s (1932-1999) talk “Ten Lessons I wish I had been taught” which dates back to Rotafest at MIT on April 20, 1996. It contains great advice for new (and experienced) mathematics professors.
Does gold tarnish? The golden spiral and nautilus shells.
I jotted down notes all summer in preparation for an entertaining article that I hoped to write for an undergraduate journal like Mathematics Magazine, College Mathematics Journal, The Mathematical Intelligencer, etc. It had the working title “Mythematics.” The idea would be to state several famous mathematical myths and either debunk them or argue for their veracity…
Student podcasts in a history of mathematics course
I would like to take this opportunity to showcase some of my students’ work from last year. I taught a class called “Great Theorems and Ideas in Mathematics.” It was an upper-level history of mathematics course with a focus on some of mathematics’ greatest theorems. I used William Dunham‘s Journey Through Genius for a good…
Wobbly tables and the intermediate value theorem
Tomorrow I’ll be introducing the intermediate value theorem (IVT) to my calculus class. Recall the statement of the IVT: if is a continuous function on the interval and is between and , then there exists a value such that . In other words, achieves all of the intermediate values between and . This is a very underappreciated theorem…
Line Rider Calculus
The first time I saw Line Rider in action, I knew I should use it for a calculus class, but I didn’t know how. Recently 360 wrote about using Line Rider in a calculus course, and so did Teaching College Math, who suggested creating a video of the action using the screen capture software Jing. This week’s topic in…
Topological claymation
For my first post, I thought I’d post a couple of short videos that I made earlier this year. The inspiration was the following sequence of pictures I put in my book illustrating what I call the “double torus clothesline trick.” It seemed like everyone I showed it to had trouble following the sequence of…
Hello world!
Welcome to my new blog. My friends and colleagues are sick of me sending them links to all the cool things I find on the web, so I thought I’d spam the world instead by posting them on my own blog. I hope other people enjoy this, but I am going to view this as…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 