Category: Math

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A Short Tribute to John Conway

John Conway passed away a few days ago. He was a favorite among mathematical educators and communicators. He was involved in a large array of interesting projects and results during his career, many that can easily fascinate even the most disinterested people when it comes to mathematics.

Here are a few things he worked on, listed roughly in the order in which I came across them in my mathematical life.

  1. Look-and-Say Sequence
  2. Game of Life
  3. Doomsday Algorithm
  4. Sporadic Groups (and far more generally, the classification of the finite simple groups)
  5. Surreal Numbers

Any of these are a treat to look into. Conway was a powerhouse of interesting and engaging ideas. Take a look at the Numberphile videos involving him for a slice of the world from his perspective.

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A Small Open Math Project

The other week, a student posted on /r/math that they made a summary of multivariable calculus. As they point out, it’s an 80-page summary, but at least it’s shorter than the textbook it followed.

The student admitted they’d used Google Docs, as opposed to LaTeX, to make these notes, and the images they used were just taken from the internet. As a result, a Github project was opened up for people to turn it into LaTeX, and I’ve taken it upon myself to slowly recreate the figures using Asymptote.

They will be added to a Dropbox folder as I make them. It’s been a fun idle project, and I’m happy to make small contributions like this. It just further confirms that I seem to be in the correct industry.

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Algorithmic Thinking and Metacognition

I’m teaching a math camp for students entering 6th grade. It’s my first time being the teacher of record for a course, and luckily it only took a few minutes for my anxiety to subside. It’s a small group – only 9 kids – so it reminds me of my days being a camp counselor, except now it’s talking about math with very advanced kids for 3 hours a day. It’s been a blast.

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Triangle Inequality for Altitudes

I’ve written a short post on the triangle inequality for altitudes. As usual, I put it over on the math blog I have with my company, just because the support for literally everything is much nicer.

But, in the off chance you want it, I have a PDF. I’ve played around with a wonderful program called Typora, which I’ve been using for a few months to write any blog posts when I’m not in my iPad. It has great Mathjax support (miles better than WordPress), and so it’s easy to switch between the blog I use and this program, and I can export cleanly to PDF, as well as EPub and other formats that are really difficult to work with if I were using straight up LaTeX.

TriangleInequalityforAltitudes

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Are You Ready?

Assessments are a tricky business. Writing an exam that successfully tests a person’s knowledge or abilities, without inadvertently giving preference or advantage to certain demographics, is very difficult. The examinations I’ve written so far for my job fall into the category of testing whether a student has mastered a certain curriculum. After a couple of months of class, we give them an exam to check if they learned all that they were supposed to. Everybody is used to such tests, and everybody has experienced them.

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