Last weekend I was in Lexingon, Kentucky for MathFest 2011. I had a very nice time and saw some very good talks. I thought, just for fun, that I’d share a couple of juicy mathematical tidbits I learned. Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio Ed Burger of Williams College gave a talk entitled “Planting your…
Tag: MAA
Odds and ends: the genius of Euler, Bulgarian solitaire, and mathematical surprises
Yesterday I attended the first-ever (as far as we know) joint meeting of the EPaDel (Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware) and New Jersey sections of the MAA. It was held at LaSalle University. I was very happy to see so many familiar faces and to make some new friends. I thought I’d share a few fun…
Odds and ends: the 2010 Joint Mathematics Meeting and Euler’s Gem
I’ll be heading to the 2010 Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Francisco next week. In case any of you are interested in meeting up, here are a few of the items on my (busy) schedule. Please introduce yourself; it would be nice to put faces with names. I’m giving a talk on some work with…
Thoughts on teaching induction
I don’t plan on doing this very often, but I thought I’d re-post one of my earlier blog posts—one that I wrote a year ago, when I had many fewer readers. Now is an appropriate time for me to re-post it because I am currently teaching induction in my Discrete Mathematics course. Enjoy. In their…
Great conference on a rainy Saturday
I brought my knot theory students to our regional meeting of the MAA today (the EPaDel section). It was one of the best EPaDel meetings I’ve attended. There were parallel talks, so it was hard to decide who to see. I decided to watch the student talks in the morning and the invited talks in…
Measuring an angle with a ruler
In the September 2008 issue of the College Mathematics Journal Travis Kowalski presents an neat way to measure an angle using a ruler. He attributes the discovery to a student of his, Tor Bertin. Given an acute angle (the technique can be modified for obtuse angles), measure off a distance on each ray. Then measure…
