Austin TX 2013/06/16 This post and the previous are sort of farewell gifts to my students who just finished their first year studying calculus. I love creating lectures (as you might imagine), but they hungered for something else. They challenged, inspired, and reminded me what I love about teaching. For me, the gift of teaching is … Continue reading Euler’s Formula
Austin, TX 2011/09/11 Ten years ago, I stood in shock, frozen in front of a TV in an apartment in Phoenix, watching as a building in New York City exploded and then crumpled to the ground. My mind and heart crumpled with it. In greater horror and confusion, I watched as a plane flew into … Continue reading Falling
the triangle Austin, TX 2011/07/17 A couple of years ago, I wrote a little program about triangles. The program calculates the area of a triangle given the base and the height. No great feat, right? Except, I did a little something special with the user interface. The triangle is graphed in a good old Cartesian … Continue reading Triangles
Austin, TX 7/7/2011 For millennia, humans have loved to operate with mathematical objects. We started with shapes. We moved them around, flipped them over, and even “added” them, laying them side-to-side. Then, we went to town on numbers, and the town grew to a metropolis of operation neighborhoods: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation. From … Continue reading Binomial Squared
47th & 7th, NYC 5/29/2011 A few days before I left for New York, my friend Jason said, “You should put the formula for time dilation in Times Square.” Brilliant! I am not sure if we made it to Times Square proper, but there was bright light, noise, and people at the corner of W … Continue reading Time(s Square) Dilation
Texarkana, AR & TX 7/8/2010 It has been more than a few months since I bore the heat of July to leave the distributive property across the state line. Laurie and I followed our noses down N State Line Avenue with Arkansas on our left and Texas on our right. For a moment I considered … Continue reading Distributive
Grand Rapids, MI7/3/2010 Here’s what you should know about the corner of Bostwick and Crescent in downtown GR: I had my first algebra class in a building on that corner. On the third floor, I had Algebra 1 with Mrs. Molloy. I am sure that was the first time I spent any quality time with … Continue reading Graphing the Quadratic Formula
Effingham, IL 6/27/2010 My first math donation in chalk occurred outside of the Helen Matthes Library. Something about Effingham was compelling, and how could I pass up the “Matthes”? So, the project began with a little riff on slope-intercept form. Many people recall slope-intercept form. Maybe not the name, but folks tend to feel a … Continue reading Slope-Intercept Form
Footpath Math: Chalk it up to a math geek 