Austin TX For many years, I was a skeptic about Pi Day. Calendars seem arbitrary, susceptible to the whim of emperors. Pi seems constant. It is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter for any circle (in the Euclidean plane). A friend sent me a link to a NYTimes article this morning about Pi Day. The … Continue reading Pi Day
New Orleans LA In graduate school, I spent a fair amount of time getting familiar[z] with the Riemann zeta function. Courses in complex analysis and special functions along with reading a couple of pop math books[e] increased my familiarity with zeta as well as the Riemann hypothesis. In answer to the gentleman’s question in New Orleans, “It … Continue reading Riemann Zeta Function
Southeast Regional Library Gilbert AZ The primes have gotten some good press this year. In January, a mathematician found a prime number with over 17 million digits.[2] He was participating in GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Sort of like SETI, but these folks unleash the power of their personal computer on a search … Continue reading Prime Parking
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
Barton Springs PoolAustin TX2013/06/02 There are so many books, articles, websites, poems and cartoons about π; I considered not chalking it. I have been working on an upcoming post on Taylor series, but π just keeps saying, “Hey, after all I have done for you, will you please just spend some time with me?” So, here … Continue reading π
Austin TX 2013/04/27 This post began as a rather ambitious endeavor. My hope was to introduce infinite series and then gracefully bounce onto power series on the way to Taylor series. It occurred to me this was too much. Like too many toppings on a pizza, the crust could only hold so much. You still … Continue reading Powers of One Half
Rue Lagrange Paris, France 2013/03/12 On the flight to Paris, while I should have been sleeping, I was thinking about math. (Not entirely unusual apart from being some 30,000 feet above the Atlantic.) France is kind of a big deal for math history. One of the Paris’ oldest churches, St-Germain-des-Prés, entombs a portion of Descartes.0 … Continue reading Lagrange Four Squares
Austin, TX 2013/03/09 My esteemed colleague, Kelley, loves space, outer space in particular along with stars, NASA, telescopes0, and all space exploring accouterments. About a month ago, she was telling me about a special map, a pulsar map. A map like this was sent into outer space on the Voyager as a message to potential … Continue reading When 1 + 1 = 10
The Alamo San Antonio, TX 2013/03/06 Often the bane of elementary school students, long division tends to have a bad reputation. Hearing “I used to like math… until long division” is not uncommon. It is as if long division was out there on the playground, turning kids upside down and skating them down for lunch … Continue reading Long Division
It all started with a square. Just a simple square. Over two thousand years ago, in a small Greek colony in southern Italy, someone noticed something was not quite right about the distance along the diagonal. Life for that someone, and their friends, was never quite the same. That someone was a member of a religious … Continue reading Square Root of 2
Footpath Math: Chalk it up to a math geek 