A couple days ago I saw this tweet. This is the year of pi. Arctan2 + Arctan1 + Arctan0 + Arctan3 = pi. #pi @centerofmath @MathJesus1 @CutTheKnotMath @maanow @mathematicsprof — John Molokach (@mathemusician_) September 7, 2013 Pretty cool! Let’s see why Two terms are easy to deal with: and But why is One way to…
Author: Dave Richeson
Using a kayak to measure the perimeter of a lake
I’m on vacation this week on a lake in northern Michigan (hold up your right hand, palm toward you, point at the first knuckle of your middle finger—that’s where I am). Yesterday I paddled around the perimeter of the lake in a kayak. On a whim I brought my GPS-enabled phone. My route is shown…
Countability of the rationals drawn using TikZ
I’m continuing my exploration of TikZ (here is my first post about TikZ). I will be showing my Discrete Math class how to “count” the positive rational numbers. (See this old blog post for more information about countable sets.) I used TikZ to create the picture below. Here is the source code for this figure. If you click…
Greatest living mathematician and expositor?
On Twitter I posed the following question: I got a great repsonse. Here is the complete—unedited—list of names (in alphabetical order). Micheal Atiyah Art Benjamin Andrea Bertozzi Manjul Bhargava Joan Birman Bela Bollobas Stephen Boyd María Chudnovsky Fan Chung John H. Conway Ingrid Daubechies Keith Devlin Marcus du Sautoy Jordan Ellenberg Joe Gallian Rob Ghrist…
Bubble diagrams for functions in LaTeX using TikZ
I am teaching Discrete Math this semester (our intro-to-proof course). One of the topics is functions. Not surprisingly my students and I have to draw “bubble diagrams” for functions between finite sets—and we have to include them in LaTeX documents. Rather than simply sketching them in Adobe Illustrator and importing them as graphics, I decided…
Circular reasoning: who first proved that C/d is a constant?
I just uploaded an article “Circular reasoning: who first proved that is a constant?” to the arXiv. The abstract is below. It is on a topic that I’ve been thinking about and reading about off-and-on for the last year and a half. I’d be happy to hear people’s thoughts, reactions, and impressions. Abstract. We answer the…
Interview on Wild about Math!
I had a very nice conversation with Sol Lederman (of the Wild about Math! blog) on his “Inspired by Math” podcast series. Check it out and be sure to check out his other podcast episodes.
Editing mathematical writing
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been assigning large-scale collaborative writing projects in my mathematics classes. I’ve had my topology students write a textbook for their class, and this semester I’ve been doing the same in my discrete mathematics class. As I mentioned in that post, the approach has been very successful, but…
How I teach topology: an inquiry-based learning approach
Recently I’ve had a number of people ask for more information about how I teach topology. I’ve taught it five times using a “modified Moore method” or “inquiry-based learning” approach. I’ve modified it each time, trying to work out the bugs. I think it is pretty successful now. Context. At our college all math majors…
The Pigpen Cipher in Latex
Recently my son and his friends have been enjoying sending secret messages back-and-forth using the pigpen cipher (also called the masonic cipher or Freemason’s cipher). It produces codes that look like: The pigpen cipher is a simple substitution cipher—there is a 1-1 correspondence between these special symbols and letters of the alphabet. The correspondence is…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 