Author Archives
In 2018 I semi-retired by retiring from Weston High School after my 21st year teaching mathematics there. This was also my 44th year as a teacher altogether. In 2023 I retired fully, adding in my 18 years at Harvard’s Crimson Summer Academy each summer. For 21 years I had taught at the Saturday Course in Milton, MA, and I used to serve on the board of the Dorchester Historical Society.
I read, cook, and spend a lot of time building my model railroad. For some reason I’m left with less free time than would be ideal, considering that I’m supposed to be retired, but somehow I also manage to devote time to my wife, Barbara, and to our varying number of cats (once up to six, but now sadly down to one).
Larry Davidson
ljd@larrydavidson.com
-
“Jewish Kid Born on Christmas Day Talking Blues”
Continuing with this year’s Christmas theme, we have “Jewish Kid Born on Christmas Day Talking Blues“ by Sally Fingerett, best known as one of the Four Bitchin’ Babes:
-
Necessity by Jo Walton: Plato, Socrates, religion, aliens, and spaceships!
It’s always sad to get to the last page of the last volume of a much-loved trilogy. Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy consists of three novels (what a surprise), the first two of which I reviewed previously in these pages. Here… Read More ›
-
Dr. Fauci recalls taking ancient Greek, Latin, and philosophy…
My cousin Mike Laskey interviewed Dr. Fauci on a podcast! Among other important things, we learn that Dr. Fauci was most heavily influenced by his college courses in Greek, Latin, and philosophy. As you can surmise from his public persona,… Read More ›
-
The true history of the birth of Jesus (plus some related remarks about 10th grade and the irreverent reverend)
Raise your hand if you have personal knowledge of the true story of the Nativity. OK, most of us were not there at the time, Connie Willis to the contrary notwithstanding, so we have to rely on the words of… Read More ›
-
“Christmas with your Jewish Boyfriend”
This goes out to a surprising number of couples I know. (I could have sent it to Barbara before we got married, but not now, as husband ≠ boyfriend.) I heard it on the Unorthodox podcast a little over a… Read More ›
-
Who reads poetry anyway?
Most likely you expect that I’m going to answer the question in the title by saying “Not me. I don’t read poetry.” If you’re a pedant — or if you believe that I am — you expect that I’ll say… Read More ›
-
Keeping warm
Skinny little Vincent keeps warm by curling up with his fat, furry, and much larger sister, Mollie:
-
The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book
I just wish this book had been published 20 years ago! Alex Bellos has compiled an amazing collection of language-related puzzles in the Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, released a few month ago in the UK and more recently elsewhere in the English-speaking… Read More ›
-
A Christmas Song for 2020
For a variety of reasons there are almost no Christmas songs that I Iike. But I can recommend a new one that I heard yesterday — a song that was specially written for the year 2020: Don’t Wait For Me… Read More ›
-
When will I ever use this in real life? (No one ever “solves for x”! (Or do they?))
As I wrote eight years ago, it seems that I discuss this topic every couple of years. But there’s always a new reason to do so. Here is the 2020 reason, expressed in this cartoon: What we have here is a… Read More ›
-
Model Citizens
Are you a model citizen? If you subscribe to Amazon Prime (and who doesn’t, these days?), go watch their excellent new video titled Model Citizens. Yes, you guessed it, it’s all about model railroaders: who we are, what we do, why we… Read More ›
-
Surreal numbers
Surrealism. That’s Dali and Magritte, right? Well, yes… but surrealism is not just in art. It also pops up in mathematics — mathematics of all things, much to the surprise of those who are not in the world of Donald… Read More ›
-
Role-playing games: based on linguistics???
For some obscure reason (I don’t really understand why) I’ve just never been into D&D or any other role-playing games. And yet… …and yet I keep running into various aspects of RPGs (role-playing games) that definitely interest me. Unsurprisingly these… Read More ›
-
Can turtle graphics really help you solve cubic equations? Sounds unlikely…
Wow! In less than half an hour, you’ll learn lots of exciting new math from Burkard the Mathologer! So watch his Turtle Math, in which you’ll learn how to use turtle graphics to solve cubic equations. Along the way you’ll… Read More ›
-
Automated translation? What could possibly go wrong?
It was 1968. Fully automated translation was just around the corner. Or so I learned in a computer science class. Of course there was officially no such discipline at the time, so it was actually an applied math class, but… Read More ›
-
One of Our Own
Was Gregor Demarkian really the “Armenian-American Hercule Poirot”? That’s what the popular press called him. Jane Haddam presents his last case in One of Our Own, the final and 30th novel in her insufficiently famous Demarkian series. She finished writing it shortly… Read More ›
-
How do you spell царь in English? Czar, tsar, csar, or tzar?
Take a word that’s written in one alphabet (Cyrillic, say). Now spell it in another alphabet (Roman, say). Why? Well, Russian is written in Cyrillic, but it’s often necessary to write Russian words in English, using the familiar Roman alphabet…. Read More ›
-
A Whiff of Death, by Isaac Asimov
Another academic mystery, this time by Isaac Asimov. Yes, Asimov was a prolific writer of science fiction and science fact, but he also wrote mysteries — mostly related to science fiction and science fact. A Whiff of Death was one of those… Read More ›
-
English is weird.
No, I’m not talking about the notorious difficulties of English spelling. Nor am I talking about the oddities of English idioms and compound words, such as the all-too-well-known “Why do we drive on a parkway and park in a driveway?”… Read More ›
-
I know it’s hard to believe, but you too can use a simple formula to generate all the prime numbers!
You probably thought that there is no such formula — one that will generate all and only the prime numbers (formula, not sieve). Right? Well, it turns out that there is! (More or less.) Keep reading… Just start with the… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 