Here are some people who studied mathematics, but are more well known for other things. Ralph Abernathy ~ civil rights leader and close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., was a mathematics professor at Alabama State University Corazon Aquino ~ former president of the Philippines, was a mathematics major at the College of Mt. St….
Category: Teaching
Applets for multivariable calculus
When I was in Portland a few weeks ago for MathFest 2009 I attended the minicourse Creating Demonstrations and Guided Explorations for Multivariable Calculus using CalcPlot3D by Paul Seeburger. Paul has created some applets to be used in calculus classes (mostly, but not exclusively, multivariable calculus). They can be found on his Exploring Multivariable Calculus…
Putting mathematical scholarship in perspective
At our college tenure decisions (as well as other personnel and salary decisions) are made by an all-college committee with faculty members from a variety of departments. There must be at least one faculty member from the sciences, but there may be no mathematician on the committee. Thus it is extremely important for the chair…
Flashlights and conic sections
Recently, Ξ over at the 360 blog wrote about hyperbolic light (which was inspired by the article, “The Shape of Lamp Shade Shadows” by Kenneth E. Horst, The Physics Teacher, Volume 39, March 2001). They were looking at the pattern of light on the wall emitted by a desk lamp with a cylindrical lampshade. They observed that the…
Recommended readings (2/27/09)
50th Carnival of Mathematics ~ Hosted by John D. Cook at the Endeavor blog Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes (readers’ responses: ‘A’ Is for Achievement, ‘E’ Is for Effort) ~ “‘What would happen,’ I asked, ‘if a player showed up at spring training and worked harder than all the others yet still bombed? Would they…
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…
Why do mirrors reverse right and left but not up and down?
Stand in front of a mirror and hold up your right hand. The person standing in the mirror holds up her left hand. Why is that? Why does a mirror reverse left and right? After all, it does not reverse up and down. Before we answer that question, we have to ask a more basic…
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…
Calculus and sustainability
I saw a number of interesting talks while at the Joint Mathematics Meeting last week. Hopefully I’ll find the time to write about some of them here. One of the presentations that got me the most excited was the minicourse that I attended, Educating about the state of the planet and sustainability while enhancing calculus,…
Publish or perish…?
I just received a copy of The Survival of a Mathematician: From Tenure-Track to Emeritus, by Steven Krantz, to review for MAA Reviews. I am only two pages in and I have already found something interesting (on p. xiv, to be precise). It is a hard fact that most American Ph.D. mathematicians write very few…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 