A colleague and I were talking about how fun it would be to be teaching a statistics class during this presidential election season—especially talking about the political polling process. Recently I came across Fivethirtyeight.com, an interesting website that takes published political polls, applies its own analysis to them, and puts out its own predictions. (It is named after the number of electors in…
They Might be Giants sing about polygons
Here is a fun video from They Might be Giants. It is from their children’s CD/DVD Here Come The 123s, the follow up to Here Come the ABCs. The song is called “Nonagon”. (I feel bad for Heptagon, who apparently wasn’t invited to the party.)
Learn the Greek alphabet
I’m a big fan of Sporcle, a website that has, as they describe it, “mentally stimulating diversions.” When I was in graduate school, one of my fellow graduate students had a terrible time learning the Greek letters. He forgot the easy ones—he repeatedly called lambda, gamma and phi, psi. His advisor joked (I think he…
Banach Obama
I have no intention of posting political items to the blog, but I got this email from a friend of mine and it made me laugh. So I thought I’d pass it along. While shopping the other day I saw this dude sportin’ a “Banach Obama” tee shirt, so naturally I had to talk to him….
Joke of the day
Two mathematicians walk into a bar. One is complaining about the state of mathematics education in America. “The average person just doesn’t know any math,” she exclaimed with disgust. The second mathematician said that he didn’t think things were so bad. After they placed their drink order with the server, the man excused himself to…
Prime number worth $100K
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation was offering a $100,000 bounty on the first Marsenne prime with over 10 million digits. A Marsenne prime is a prime number of the form . The first 10 million digit prime was discovered on August 23, 2008 by a computer at UCLA. The prime, , has 12,978,189 digits. It was discovered as part…
Cloud computing makes me nervous
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…
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.
David Richeson: Division by Zero 