Indexes can be great tools for finding specific information in books. However, as we all know, they are often maddeningly incomplete. I was constantly frustrated when I was in graduate school studying for my analysis prelim exam. Royden’s Real Analysis (our text) had a terrible index. I ended up hand writing dozens of entries into…
Category: Academic Technology
Create your own word clouds
This post is not really math-related. I discovered a cool website called Wordle, which you can use to generate custom word clouds. Here’s how Wordle describes itself. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text….
Technology of today’s students
Amherst College has over 1680 students. Of them, only 14 have desktop computers and 5 have landline telephones. Here is an interesting list of IT related facts about the college and their students. [via]
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…
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…
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…
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…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 