I am teaching a history of mathematics class this semester. We are beginning with a brief discussion of ancient number systems: Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan, Chinese, Incan, Greek, Roman, and Hindu-Arabic. As I was writing up the first homework assignment it occured to me that I should investigate whether these numbers could be typeset using LaTeX. It…
Category: Academic Technology
Cantor set applet
I made this Cantor set applet for my Real Analysis class. It is nothing fancy, but it saves me from drawing it on the board.
Applet to illustrate the epsilon-delta definition of limit
Here’s a GeoGebra applet that I made for my Real Analysis class. It can be used to explore the definition of limit: Definition. The limit of as approaches is , or equivalently if for any there exists such that whenever , it follows that .
A quick guide to LaTeX
This semester I’ll be teaching real analysis. I am going to have the students type their homework in LaTeX. To make this as easy for them as possible, I will give them a template that is all ready for them to enter their solutions. They shouldn’t have to worry about headers, packages, font sizes, margins,…
Three geometric theorems
Just for fun I thought I’d share a few interesting geometric theorems that I came across recently. Morley’s miracle In 1899 Frank Morley, a professor at Haverford, discovered the following remarkable theorem. The three points of intersection of the adjacent trisectors of the angles of any triangle form an equilateral triangle. I’ve made a Geogebra…
Tricks for easily creating BibTeX files
I wrote my last book (my only book, that is) using LaTeX. I had a large bibliography with close to 400 entries. I stored all of the bibliographic items in a BibTeX file (a text file ending in .bib). Each item looks something like this: @book {Richeson:2008, AUTHOR = {Richeson, David S.}, TITLE = {Euler’s gem:…
Coffee stains and the Simpsons in your LaTeX document
A few weeks ago John D. Cook posted a tweet asking for suggestions for his @TeXtip Twitter feed. Usually @TeXtip posts are useful tips or factual tidbits about the typesetting program. I decided to send him a humorous suggestion instead. He posted the tip on Twitter yesterday. I sent him a link to Hanno Rein’s coffee.sty package…
Interview on Strongly Connected Components
I had the pleasure of chatting with Samuel Hansen on the telephone a little while ago. Our conversation is now online as Episode 16 of his Strongly Connected Components podcast series. Check it out! While you’re at it, check out his other interviews as well as his other podcast series, Combinations and Permutation (he discussed my book…
John D. Cook’s daily Twitter tips
One of the most prolific and interesting math bloggers and Twitters, John D. Cook (his blog is The Endeavor and he is @JohnDCook on Twitter) has been using Twitter in a very interesting way. In addition to his personal account, he has set up more than half a dozen daily Twitter messages on a variety of…
Mathematical cousins and collaboration numbers
A couple days ago Michael Lugo at God Plays Dice shared a link to a mathematical relationships search. Enter the names of two people with PhDs in mathematics and it will spit out their academic relationship. For example, my advisor, John Franks, is my academic father and my good friend and collaborator Jim Wiseman is my academic…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 