A week ago I mentioned that I was going to sit on a panel called Family Matters at MathFest sponsored by the Association for Women in Mathematics. It was to focus on balancing work and family. I was nervous about it, but it turned out to be a great experience. My fellow panelists and the…
Delicious pie chart
An accurate pie chart: [Image by Laszlo Thoth under a Creative Commons license]
Calculating miles per gallon for electric cars
“GM says new Volt could get 230 mpg in city driving.” This was a headline yesterday about GM’s new electric car. Wow, pretty impressive! But wait,… what?!? This car (which seems quite promising, actually) has batteries that can propel the car for approximately 40 miles. Only after the batteries are empty does a gas-powered generator…
Infinite hat problems (solutions)
Yesterday I stated four hat problems. Today’s post contains the solutions to those problems. 1. Alice and Bob are wearing hats. The hats are either red or blue. They can see each other’s hats, but not their own hat. They are tasked with guessing their own hat color. If either person gets the color right, then they…
Infinite hat problems
I got back from MathFest yesterday after a long 3-leg red-eye trip across the country. It was a great meeting. It is always fun to hear some good talks, visit a new city, and see old friends (and meet another math blogger). The first talk that I attended was given by Alan Taylor: “Predicting Values of…
I need to learn how to say no
I’m heading to MathFest in a few days. I’m giving a talk on some generalizations of the Japanese Theorem (which I hope to blog about at some point), I am a panelist on the AWM panel called Family Matters, and, since I’m on the MAA Committee for Minicourses, I will be monitoring two minicourses. I also hope…
New journal publishes inaugural issue
The inaugural issue of Rejecta Mathematica is now available online. In case you haven’t heard of this one-of-a-kind journal, here is part of their mission statement: Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences….
What is the LaTeX code for that?
It is hard to count how many times I’ve scrolled through Scott Pakin’s The Comprehensive LATEX Symbol List (pdf) looking for the LaTeX code for some obscure mathematical symbol. That pdf document may no longer be the first place I turn. Daniel Kirsch, a math student from Münster, Germany has created a very useful website…
Videos of past meetings of the ICM
As you may know, the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians will be held in Hyderabad, India. This weekend I received an invitation to speak at one of the satellite conferences (Various Aspects of Dynamical Systems) at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Vadodara, India, which is being held immediately after the ICM. Needless to…
Quantifier soup
Anyone who has tried to teach Calculus I students the definition of the limit knows that students have a difficult time working out definitions with multiple quantifiers. In fact it is something that we must come back to again and again with our mathematics majors. While doing a little research this week I came across…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 