Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Euler and his many contributions to mathematics. So, just for fun I decided to make a Geogeba applet showing the “Euler Line.” In 1763 Euler proved that three different centers of a triangle—the centroid, the orthocenter, and the circumcenter—are collinear. This line is called the Euler line. The centroid…
Category: Academic Technology
Using wikis in mathematics classes
Wikipedia describes a wiki as a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages… [Wikis] are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems. I have used wikis in three of my classes: two…
Posting items to my blog using wplatex
This blog post is aimed at other mathematicians who write on WordPress blogs. I’m writing this blog post completely in TexShop on my Mac! Recently I discovered that Eric Finster at Curious Reasoning wrote a Python script called wplatex that converts LaTeX documents to HTML that is WordPress compatible. Then it posts the files directly…
Three applets illustrating parametric curves
In my multivariable calculus we’re talking about parametric curves. I’m using this applet for displaying parametric curves. You can use predefined curves or enter your own. Although the applet is on my web page, it was created by Marc Renault, a friend who teaches down the road at Shippensburg University. I only tweaked it slightly when…
Three applets for linear algebra or multivariable calculus
This semester I’m teaching two sections of Calculus III (multivariable calculus) and I happen to be teaching the first four weeks of Linear Algebra. The first couple weeks of both courses cover properties of vectors in Rn. (Of course, just to confuse the instructor and the students who happen to be in both classes, the…
Division by Zero listed as one of 50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders
This morning I was pleased to discover that my blog appears on OnlineUniversities.com‘s blog in their list of the 50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders; it was one of the five blogs listed in the Subject Specific category. What a nice surprise. I’m very honored for the recognition! This is the first I’d read their…
How to email all the students in your class with only two clicks of your mouse
[Update: thanks to one of the comments below, I could rename this post “How to email all the students in your class with only one click of your mouse.”] This post has no math in it. But it may be helpful to teachers (and others who regularly email a group of people). I often have…
New applets page
Over the last few years I’ve made quite a few web applets. But they have been scattered all over the place. As a good end-of-semester project I decided to consolidate all of them and create an applets page. Enjoy.
Cobweb plots for the logistic map: a Geogebra applet
A few days ago I posted Geogebra applets illustrating discrete dynamical systems. I was using these in a differential equations lecture that I gave. In the next lecture I showed the students how to draw cobweb plots for 1-dimensional discrete dynamical systems. A discrete dynamical system is a function in which the range is a…
An applet illustrating a continuous, nowhere differentiable function
Open any calculus book and you will find a discussion about how differentiability implies continuity, but continuity does not imply differentiability. The absolute value function is the standard example of a continuous function that is not differentiable (at ). The inquisitive student may ask: how bad can continuous, nondifferentiable functions get? Can we make a…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 