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 