Congratulations to Weston High School for finishing first in this year’s medium-size schools division of the New England Math Championships! Weston earned 97 points to capture first place. Avon, CT, came out of nowhere to score 93 points, providing a… Read More ›
Six topics in a single blog post? How can that be? Well, it’s all because those are six of the topics discussed in a single blog post in Scott Aaronson’s interesting blog, Shtetl-Optimized — all being examples of things that make… Read More ›
You know how college recommendation forms often ask “What three words first come to mind about this applicant?” In the case of Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Codebreakers of World War II, the three words would be fascinating, absorbing,… Read More ›
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, where I wrote “I also gave a second talk, in a breakout session, on cryptography.” The crypto talk was a bit more informal than the keynote; it had an audience of about a… Read More ›
Yesterday I delivered the Keynote Address at the annual conference of the New England Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges. Despite being an INTJ — which means that I should have been exhausted by the presence of so many other people —… Read More ›
Congratulations to the Weston High School Math Team for finishing first in the state in the Massachusetts Math League!
This is the first time in 26 years that I haven’t been able to observe a weekday Pi Day with any of my classes. Sigh. But there are plenty of online resources for my past, present, and future students.
I returned to Weston yesterday for its 17th annual Fractal Fair. That’s a lot of fractal fairs! As you might expect for a subject that keeps evolving every year, with an entirely new set of exhibitors every year, the fair… Read More ›
Yesterday I posted this problem: Great Fermi problem that I just heard on the Ask Me Another quiz show on NPR: Estimate how many Tater Tots were consumed in the U.S. during all of 2017. The answer (from CBS News)… Read More ›
Great Fermi problem that I just heard on the Ask Me Another quiz show on NPR: Estimate how many Tater Tots were consumed in the U.S. during all of 2017. Correct answer will be posted in this space tomorrow.
Do we believe what the Wolfram Blog says about computational thinking? Maybe. I’m suspicious of the very title of the post: The Computational Classroom: Easy Ways to Introduce Computational Thinking into Your Lessons. Anything that promises “easy ways” is automatically… Read More ›
“You learn something new every day of your life,” my dad used to say to me. He was right, of course. A week ago I learned a concept that is, apparently, familiar to economists and philosophers but was for some… Read More ›
“In the Mathematics Department we don’t work with greasy machines,” replied one of my undergraduate math professors with a sneer. “You’re going to have to go to the Applied Math department if that’s what you want to do.” That was… Read More ›
Going through some old papers, I came across a summary of student feedback from Relations & Functions, a course I team-taught at Lincoln-Sudbury (L–S). This was more-or-less equivalent to today’s Honors Precalculus, and it’s instructive to consider the similarities and… Read More ›
I can’t help keeping track. Four restaurant meals ago, at the Menotomy Grill, our young server said “Awesome!” four times during our meal. I foolishly thought that would be some kind of record. Lower Mills Tavern was better: just two… Read More ›
At the high-school level, a student can’t be expected to understand the concepts behind the math; you’re just expected to be able to do the math. So says a commenter from Old Field, NY, objecting to a wonderful article in… Read More ›
Here we are, one day after primary elections in Massachusetts, and we see that whoever got the most votes in each race won. Right? Well, it’s not so simple. In the first place, one tenet of democracy is majority rule,… Read More ›
All cultures count in base ten, because humans have ten fingers. That’s common knowledge — so common that it isn’t even true. It is, of course, true that most cultures count in base ten, with some obvious and well-known exceptions… Read More ›
Fellow math nerds: check out Sandra Boynton’s pet, Fibonacci. Of course he’s a golden meanie: She describes him thus: The Golden Meanie is a mythical beast of pleasing proportions but unpleasant temperament. Oh well. You can’t have everything.
Why did somebody recommend to me a blog called A Portrait of a Math Teacher as an Aging Man? Are they trying to tell me something? I’m not sure that I should be thrilled about that 😀. Nevertheless, the recommended blog… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 