Link: A mathematician reads the New Yorker, or, math for votes This week’s New Yorker features an article on voting, and it’s a good read. What does this have to do with mathematics? Well, mathematicians have been thinking about [...]
When: Tuesday, July 13, 1:30pm-3pm Where: The reading room at Elliott Bay Books, 10th and Pine in Capitol Hill. What: An opportunity for kids to explore some of the best stuff in mathematics with a working mathematician. Cost: $25. Please [...]
It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before I felt the need, the yen, the hankering for some mathematical activity again. To that end, I borrowed my girlfriend’s copy of The [...]
The Place: the reading room at Elliott Bay Books. Large but with no natural light, and imperfect lighting. The Time: this afternoon at 1:30. The Crew: 7 kids, in the 2-4th grade [...]
The theme of the book, if we get down to it, is honesty in teaching. No question why it’s aggravating sometimes and inspiring others, why this guy Herndon grates on your nerves with his pompousness and his insistence that he’s got some [...]
There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of [...]
Link: A Sort of Maze When I was a child, I went through a period of maze drawing. There was something deeply compelling to me in the question of how anyone can tell the good direction from the bad. They were a stand in for all kinds of [...]
We spent the next twenty minutes recollecting the argument and writing it down. It was an amazing accomplishment for a second grader.
I inherited from my dad a bookshelf of books on teaching, many of which were written in the sixties and seventies and feel as anachronistically radical as, say, the Declaration of Independence (…whenever any Form of Government becomes [...]
Audio For a limited time, you can listen to this series on the history of mathematics on BBC radio. I’m hearing about Fourier right now, who, by the way, was apparently an excellent math teacher, who encouraged questions from his [...]
“You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than you can from a lifetime of conversation” ~ Plato
Speaking of How to Survive in Your Native Land, here’s a beautiful remark from that book, where the author is describing his colleague, Frank, teaching his students to diagram [...]
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