As Ivars Peterson and others have pointed out, Jackson Pollock’s paintings can be analyzed mathematically as fractals, and they turn out to have a distinctive fractal dimension. As various articles have pointed out, inauthentic (forged) Pollocks have incorrect fractal dimensions…. Read More ›
Month: February 2007
Second Life or WoW?
Would I be interested in joining a 3-D virtual world in my copious free time, which doesn’t really exist? Some of my students have been trying to persuade me to play World of Warcraft (Wow). (That was the standard acronym,… Read More ›
St. Alban's Fire
Archer Mayor’s well-crafted series of police procedurals has a highly deserved reputation for strong and careful plotting. As a Vermonter, Mayor writes in a style that convincingly evokes the state of Vermont — as much so as Lawrence Block evokes… Read More ›
Happy numbers, unhappy families
One of my students came across the Wikipedia article on Happy Numbers and asked about it in precalculus class. This is the sort of topic for which Wikipedia is an excellent source; in fact, if I wanted to know about… Read More ›
An ethical dilemma
It is unethical, as I’m sure you know, for a teacher to reveal any individual student’s grade to another student. (Students reveal their own grades all the time, of course, but that’s their decision, not ours.) This principle placed one… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 