One of my computer science colleagues sent me this quote from Polya about Euler. This is usually something I’d to post on Twitter, but it is too long. So I thought I’d reproduce it here. …among old mathematicians, I was most influenced by Euler and mostly because Euler did something that no other great mathematician of…
Tag: Polya
Thoughts on how to teach induction
In their article “Some observations on teaching induction,” (MAA Focus, May/June 2008, pp. 9–10) Mary Flahive and John Lee give tips on how to teach induction. For a variety of reasons, they encourage professors to downplay proofs of theorems such as the “baby Gauss” formula for all . Indeed, I have noticed that students can…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 