Posts in category Blog on Blogs
Mistakes Are Interesting
Image: Aaron Rotenberg, via Wikimedia Commons.
Last semester, the most frustrating (at least to me) mistake my students made on their first midterm was saying that if a set was open, then it wasn’t closed, and vice versa. They sometimes even came to the conclusion that Rd was neither open nor closed because it was both open and closed! That m [...]
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Flip Coi...
What are the odds?
A production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead inspired two blog posts about coin flips and probability.
As they keep flipping coins and Rosencrantz’s purse continues to grow, Guildenstern concludes that there are several possible explanations for the extremely unlikely run of heads:
“One: I’m wi [...]
The Revolution Will Be 3-D Printed
Ducks and blocks illustrating different resolution options on the Afinia 3D printer. Image: Laura Taalman. Used with permission.
I’m impressed with the wide range of things Taalman prints at home. In addition to cool math stuff (more on that in a moment), she makes toys such as Daleks and polyhedral bears and useful household objects such as [...]
Winter Break Reading: Baking and Math
Sierpinski cookies. Image: Lenore Edman, via flickr.
On failure and coconut chocolate chip cookies. “I failed at these cookies. I fail at math sometimes. I am not a failure of a person, and while I enjoy baking and math, being great at either of them does not define me as a person.” I am writing this post after grading my final exams. The exa [...]
Hypocycloids
Rolling rolling rolling, hypocycloids rolling… Image: Greg Egan.
A John Baez blog post about hypocycloids will lovely animations by Greg Egan made my week and inspired two blog posts.
On the AMS Blog on Math Blogs, I wrote about math that’s illustrated with animated gifs. On Roots of Unity, I wrote about the hypocycloids themselve [...]
How Quadratic Reciprocity Is Like Dea...
Part of Baker’s explanation of quadratic reciprocity using cards. Image: Matt Baker. Used with permission.
Currently the Riemann-Roch theorem is my nemesis, and I stumbled on Matt Baker’s math blog while I was looking for some help figuring out how to use it. The post I came across, Riemann-Roch for Graphs and Applications, was no [...]
Exploding Myths about the History of ...
An illustration from Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum. This image from From the book, “The Science-History of the Universe” by Francis Rolt-Wheeler is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1923.
We want our heroes to be virtuous at all times, clear-thinking visionaries who neve [...]
Significantly Statistical Blogs
Image: xkcd.
It’s almost Halloween, so I thought it was appropriate to write about something scary: statistics! (That was a joke, statisticians.) As a mathematician, I can get by in statistics, but I am not a native speaker. As someone who writes about math and science for a non-specialist audience, I think that statistics and an accura [...]
On Mathematics Education and Music Ed...
This connection between mathematics education and music education has been made several times, especially in mathematics education circles. Paul Lockhart’s famous Mathematician’s Lament starts with an analogy between math education and music education. We would be appalled if music students weren’t allowed touch their instruments until they h [...]
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum
A panorama of Heidelberg. Image: Coolgarriv, via Flickr.
The first-ever Heidelberg Laureate Forum is taking place this week. It’s modeled after the decades-old Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, which bring together Nobel Laureates and young researchers for a conference on a particular topic. Mathematics and computer science are not repres [...]
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