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
Austin TX 2013/04/09 It probably is not possible to make it through contemporary middle and high school math without seeing M.C. Escher’s work. A genius, for sure, Escher created mind-bending art, stretching and twisting classic geometric shapes to fit his desires. A significant portion of Escher’s artwork was based on tessellations. A tessellation is a … Continue reading Miles of Tiles
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
Austin TX 2012/06/28 In December of 2009, I picked up a book by Steven Strogatz called The Calculus of Friendship.0 Reading the book, I found myself touched by the story of the author’s life-long relationship with his high school Calculus teacher, affectionately called Joff. They corresponded about interesting math problems for years as Strogatz went … Continue reading Sine Squared
Space Needle, Seattle WA 12/23/2011 Sitting in a coffee shop in 1959, Edward E. Carlson was imagining and sketching a tower of the future to stand tall above the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. After many iterations and the input of architect John Graham, the flying saucer-inspired shape we know (and, at least some of … Continue reading Angular Velocity
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
Ecuador Guest chalker = Julie Friends of mine, Melissa, Orion, and Julie, traveled to Ecuador this summer. Melissa and her son, Orion, went south in June. In July, Julie was heading down to meet up with Melissa and Orion. She mentioned going to the Equator. First, rather dimly, I said something like, “The Equator runs … Continue reading Equatorial Distance
Footpath Math: Chalk it up to a math geek 