Last week when I was trying to sort out a combinatorial question related to my research, I accidentally ended up redoing some fun geometry of the type covered (?) in an undergraduate discrete math, or intro to topology course. I’m … Continue reading →

The feelings that I associate with Quaternions (which I will persist in capitalizing, as an homage to their 19th century origins) are not really professional. I see them as a Victorian curiosity; the kind of thing that might be referenced … Continue reading →

Damn you, Salman Khan, for seeing what nobody else (apparently) could see. It all seems so simple in retrospect — we have the internet, we have youtube, we have cheap videocameras.  Mini-lectures on focussed topics,  the screen just shows the … Continue reading →

Lately I’ve been playing around with the free software package SAGE, which does a lot of things mathematical.  Though I think most people will have heard of SAGE, let me give their mission statement as expressed on their website: Sage … Continue reading →

Professor Laurence (Laurie) Kirby at Baruch College has a couple of places in cyberspace, including his faculty bio, his own website and blog, to express his interests. Skimming through their contents, I got my eye caught by the sentence, “What … Continue reading →

Last week I went to two talks on my campus.  One was by Richard Stallman, one of the founders of the GNU project and thus a co-inventor of Linux. The other was by the Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen. Both … Continue reading →