I inherited from my dad a bookshelf of books on teaching, many of which were written in the sixties and seventies and feel as anachronistically radical as, say, the Declaration of Independence (…whenever any Form of Government becomes [...]
Audio For a limited time, you can listen to this series on the history of mathematics on BBC radio. I’m hearing about Fourier right now, who, by the way, was apparently an excellent math teacher, who encouraged questions from his [...]
“You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than you can from a lifetime of conversation” ~ Plato
Speaking of How to Survive in Your Native Land, here’s a beautiful remark from that book, where the author is describing his colleague, Frank, teaching his students to diagram [...]
Last Thursday, I defended my thesis. The process was challenging, in that I have a tendency to be casual with certain details, and in this context I was called to task over each one of these. Most unexpected was being caught about a [...]
Perhaps you’ve noticed the dearth of blogging lately here at mathforlove. Here’s the story: I’m defending my thesis—“On the Number of FM Partners of a K3 Surface”—this Thursday afternoon, so at the moment, I’m ensconced in [...]
Avery Pickford is a teacher I used to work with. He regularly beat me at scrabble (and I’m pretty formidable in most crowds), and he taught me ultimate tic-tac-toe, where you add a box after every turn, and need to get four in a row to [...]
Link: Assume a spherical villain
Link: The End of Strogatz’s Series in the Times It’s been a nice run, and tremendously well received. Here’s the last installment of Steve Strogatz’s New York Times math articles. This one actually tries to prove that there are [...]
Link: Addendum to post on a free education I just found this effort to use TED talks as high school curriculum. Nice idea.
Matt Damon said it first, in Good Will Hunting: one day, you’re going to realize that “You dropped 150 grand on a $%*#ing education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library.” Here’s the paradox of [...]
I don’t know why it’s taken me so long, but I’ve decided to start teaching the art of inquiry to everyone I tutor. Step 1: all my private students will have the homework of bringing in a question to every tutoring session. I’ve run [...]
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