Monthly Archives: November 2016

Riddle of the Month (November)

Welcome back to this month’s mathematical riddle (and can you believe it’s almost December)! Today we have a neat logic puzzle with an amusing twist on the traditional knight-or-knave problems that are popular in the literature.

Posted in Math Games, puzzles, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Mathematical Democracy: Mission Impossible? Maybe not…

In 1950, a 29-year-old PhD candidate at Columbia published a stunning theorem that later won him a Nobel Prize: “There is no such thing as a fair voting system.”  Or so the legend goes.  Let’s dive into this claim and … Continue reading

Posted in Math, Math in Pop Culture, Mathematics in Society, Social Justice, Uncategorized, Voting Theory | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

What is a Manifold? (3/6)

Intrinsic descriptions One immediate benefit of considering coordinate-free descriptions of geometric objects is that we may talk about “curves” that are not a priori embedded in . In other words, we don’t have to start with a subset of to … Continue reading

Posted in Math | 1 Comment

Conquering Students’ Mid-Semester Complacency

About a week after their first test, during the first round of midterms of the semester for undergraduate students, mid-semester complacency came swooping into my classroom. My once invigorated students suddenly started going through the motions of class rather than … Continue reading

Posted in Math Education, Teaching | Tagged | Comments Off on Conquering Students’ Mid-Semester Complacency