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 →

I have never had any formal training in “how to a teach” — my own graduate studies, for better or for worse, were purely mathematical — and although I do expend a little energy towards keeping up with the world … Continue reading →

Should a textbook always give the whole truth?  Being sticklers for detail, as mathematicians generally are, the answer would seem to be an obvious “yes.” In some cases it’s even difficult to imagine what the “partial truth” would be. But … Continue reading →

Utterly inspired by the header image of the Cairo tessellation (Jonas’s 2/4 post), I’ve been slightly obsessed by street tiling these days. On a recent Friday when the weather was simply gorgeous, I, along with my dog, Basil, decided to … Continue reading →

I once had an undergraduate professor, charmingly bespectacled and pleasantly ill-suited for his chosen career of mathematics, who said that no matter how high one goes in math, he or she would still need from time to time to take … Continue reading →