Monthly Archives: April 2016

Dance Your Dissertation: Behind the Scenes

Three years ago, our former editor Diana Davis created the following math youtube sensation, conveying the main ideas of her geometry dissertation to the general public through dance, music, and some highly-skillful video editing. Today, we unlock the magic behind it.  First, … Continue reading

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Traversing Mountain Passes

Suppose you need to walk through a wet parking lot. The lot is covered with puddles and you would like to keep your shoes as dry as possible. If you know the depth of the puddles at every point, how do … Continue reading

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For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

As the perhaps apocryphal story goes, the title of this piece is a six-word novel written by Ernest Hemingway as part of a bet while at lunch with a group of writers. The idea behind the six-word story, also commonly know as … Continue reading

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3 Revolutionary Women of Mathematics

Originally published by Scientific American  From the profound revelations of the shape of space to the furthest explorations reachable by imagination and logic, the history of mathematics has always been seen as a masculine endeavor. Names like Gauss, Euler, Riemann, … Continue reading

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Eigenightmares, Dancing Stick Figures, and the Advantages of a Spiral Approach to Pedagogy

For my next installment on innovative teaching techniques, I’d like to dredge another demon that haunted my nights long ago—EIGENVECTORS!  Normally, eigenvectors are introduced in the waning days of a first-year linear algebra course, when students’ minds are already saturated … Continue reading

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