I have no intention of posting political items to the blog, but I got this email from a friend of mine and it made me laugh. So I thought I’d pass it along. While shopping the other day I saw this dude sportin’ a “Banach Obama” tee shirt, so naturally I had to talk to him….
Category: Math
Joke of the day
Two mathematicians walk into a bar. One is complaining about the state of mathematics education in America. “The average person just doesn’t know any math,” she exclaimed with disgust. The second mathematician said that he didn’t think things were so bad. After they placed their drink order with the server, the man excused himself to…
Prime number worth $100K
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation was offering a $100,000 bounty on the first Marsenne prime with over 10 million digits. A Marsenne prime is a prime number of the form . The first 10 million digit prime was discovered on August 23, 2008 by a computer at UCLA. The prime, , has 12,978,189 digits. It was discovered as part…
The nuts and bolts of writing mathematics
This was a handout that I made for my Discrete Mathematics class. At our college this course is the gateway to the mathematics major and is the students’ introduction to writing mathematical arguments. Here is a pdf of the handout. The nuts and bolts of writing mathematics You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly…
Advice for new faculty
Mathematics under the Microscope recently posted the text of Gian-Carlo Rota‘s (1932-1999) talk “Ten Lessons I wish I had been taught” which dates back to Rotafest at MIT on April 20, 1996. It contains great advice for new (and experienced) mathematics professors.
Does gold tarnish? The golden spiral and nautilus shells.
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…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 