I love my job—I teach at a small, highly selective liberal arts college. It is a great place to work. But one thing I miss from my days at big research universities is the constant stream of research mathematicians who give seminars and colloquia. I am within two hours of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and…
Category: Academic Technology
Students as Facebook friends?
I’ve been on Facebook for approximately six months. I resisted for a long time, but caved in eventually. While there are many things I dislike about Facebook, it can be an interesting trip down memory lane (As Lev Grossman wrote in Why Facebook Is for Old Fogies, “son, we’ve lost track of more people than you’ve…
LaTeX bugs in WordPress
Terrence Tao wrote a blog post today about LaTeX bugs in WordPress. He suggests compiling a list of all bugs so that WordPress can work on them. I had already discovered the closed bracket bug that Tao describes. I have also encountered a bug similar to the one mentioned in the first comment to Tao’s…
How to use KnotPlot
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m teaching a knot theory class this semester. I’ve been playing around with KnotPlot, a powerful piece of software for drawing and working with knots. I want my students use it, but it has a somewhat unintuitive interface. So I’m trying to write up a list of easy-to-use instructions for them. The…
Definition of continuity video
Thank you to Dansmath for turning me on the website xtranormal. It allows you to create your own animated videos. It is easy and fun. You can choose the characters, the scene, the camera angles, the gestures and facial expression, music, etc. They do the voices for you—you just type the script. Here are some of Dan’s videos….
Twittering Division by Zero
I’ve been on Twitter for a few months, posting unimportant details about my life. But I’ve decided to repurpose that service and make it another outlet for my Division by Zero blog. In case you are not aware, Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows you to publish posts (“tweets”) of up to 140 characters at…
Weapons of math instruction
Google is digitizing 10 million photos from the the LIFE Magazine archives. Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google. Here are a couple mathematical ones. Caption: Cadets…
Google beats the CDC at their own game
Check this out! Google has been using search results to measure the severity of flu outbreaks around the United States. Google describes the phenomonon as follows. We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms… We compared our query counts with data…
Google scholar trick makes it more useful
Google Scholar is a resource for using Google to search for scholarly publications. I have not used the site much because, in my experience, it has been more of a frustration than an aid in research. When I used Google Scholar in the past I quickly found a link to the paper, but when I…
Red and blue election maps
I thought I’d made my last election-related post for a few years, but here’s one more. This is the red and blue 2008 election map we have gotten used to seeing for the past week. Mark Newman, a pysicist at the University of Michigan made a collection interesting election maps using software called Cart. Cart…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 