I was just tutoring someone in their Calculus 2 course, and we did a problem on geometric series. When I was a student, I remember memorizing several facts about geometric series without really grokking the algebraic details of why the formulas you come up with are so nice. Since it is fresh in my mind, I figured I’d go through the standard approach. ...
Through a wonderful little game called TeXnique, I became aware of the online typesetting system KaTeX. Unlike MathJax, which is immensely finicky, slow, and has limited support for proper LaTeX, the KaTeX system supports scaling of rendered images, automatically detects the text color of my site and adapts as necessary, and has a fuller implementation of LaTeX commands.
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. ...
As with most nerds, I have a predisposition to being nerd sniped. Sometimes it’s a puzzle, but more often it’s simply an idea or the opportunity for a new project. After a conversation with a few coworkers, I’ve latched onto the idea of developing a summer course focused on the history of mathematics. ...
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. ...
Earlier this year, I started working on a programming project. I recently added a little more to it, and worked out a handful of kinks. It’s been fun, but I think I’m winding down on it. I’m sure in some spurts of passion I’ll work on it some more, but I’ve moved on to another Python-related project, that also gets to the core of my interests: mathematics. ...
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. ...
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.
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. ...
It was my older sister’s birthday yesterday, and it had me thinking about how we talk about birthdays. There’s a peculiar inconsistency in the language we use which I vaguely noticed for the first time a couple of years ago, but never really pursued the thought. We index our birthdays from 0. ...