Link: Hilbert’s Hotel I love this Waylay comic about Hilbert’s Hotel. She does a beautiful job of explaining the paradox succinctly, and of tapping into the sense of human (nonmathematician) frustration with the whole deal at the same [...]
It’s called “What I was working on today.” I come out and aggressively challenge the audience: “I’m Dan, and I’m a math student PhD, and tonight one of you is going to come up here and solve a math problem, because you’re not [...]
Link: A math op-ed, circa 1996 By Suzanne Sutton. Here’s a quote: It is among the greatest ironies of education that a subject so graceful and elegant, so able to inspire and bolster confidence, and so useful for living a joyous and [...]
First of all, the math dance piece went quite well (at least, I had some positive feedback). In part of it I ask for questions from the audience, and I’m not sure I answered them all as well as I could have, but I was able to spiral [...]
I’ll be premiering my math dance piece tonight when my dance group, Stimulate Dance performs. Very exciting. I also get to do my sibling piece, which I know will be okay—it’s a very likeable piece. The math piece feels like it’s a [...]
This is actually a fractal picture! There’s a gallery of them here. Gorgeous.
Here’s a question I’ve always liked: what kind of world does Pac-Man on? We know we live on a sphere, or course, or something close to it. But we often imagine our world on [...]
The other day a friend related a math nightmare. She was in a prison-like compound. People guarded the exits, and they wouldn’t let her out until she solved a calculus problem. She couldn’t ever do it, and her teeth started to fall [...]
Link: Mathematical Flimflam One thing that’s always struck me is how mathematics has been interpreted by so many people in so many contexts as a direct conduit to God’s thoughts. This link is a modern manifestation of that—but sadly [...]
The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for [...]
Link: One Manifesto People have been writing about the failure of math education for a long, long time. For example: S. K. Stein, Strength in Numbers, John Wiley & Sonse, 1996 If you browse through The Mathematics Teacher, the main [...]
The mathematician does not study pure mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful. – J.H.Poincare (1854-1912)
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